Howl
by dynamicsymmetry
Summary: A year after the mysterious slaughter of her entire family, Beth Greene is no closer to finding those responsible, and no one will believe her when she insists they weren't human. But when she saves a monster of a very different kind, she finds herself drawing close to her goal in ways she never expected. And he might be the most unexpected thing of all. Bethyl and werewolves, yay
1. the start of how it all ends

**Note:** Those of you who are familiar with the manic - yes, I really do mean to use that word - pace at which I wrote _I'll Be Yours For a Song_ should not expect that here. I mean, it might happen, but this is a very different kind of story in most important respects, and it doesn't feel to me like it's going to flow anywhere near as easily.

Additionally, I may borrow from The World of Darkness's _Werewolf: the Apocalypse_ for some of this, without going right over into crossover territory. Just to establish that not all of the non-TWD culture and lore here will necessarily be fully mine.

For stuff about this on my blog (dynamicsymmetry dot tumblr dot com) refer to the "howl" tag.

Here we go.

* * *

 **Chapter 1: the start of how it all ends**

 _Now Chil the Kite brings home the night_  
 _That Mang the Bat sets free-_  
 _The herds are shut in byre and hut,_  
 _For loosed till dawn are we._  
 _This is the hour of pride and power,_  
 _Talon and tush and claw._  
 _Oh, hear the call!-Good hunting all_  
 _That keep the Jungle Law!_

\- Rudyard Kipling

Beth's first thought is that he's beautiful.

It's a crazed thought, embarrassingly hysterical, and it hits her with every bit of the force he uses to hit the ground. Later she looks back at this moment and she understands so many things so much better, and one of the things she understands is that he is _he,_ but for the moment, stumbling back with her knife still clutched in her numb hand, blood running hot down her side from a hard line of talon scores slashed through her jacket, all panting and reeking fear sweat and despairing rage because she's sure - even more now - that she's about to die, she watches it as it leaps from the low incline of the liquor store's roof, powerful hind legs drawn up and thickly muscled forelegs - fore _arms?_ \- spread back and wide like bat wings without the wing, and it's insane.

But she thinks it's beautiful.

Its lines, its hard curves, the way it slices its huge body through the air, somehow graceful where no grace should be present. All that power coiling and uncoiling under glossy black. Beautiful.

Then she returns to thinking she's about to die.

She stumbles backward a step, two, and she's wryly pleased with herself when she doesn't flinch as it lands on all fours in front of her. The three snarling, naked monstrosities - there was only supposed to be one, she only saw one come back here - are still ranged behind her, patchy hides mottled with sores and filthy yellowed fur, scythe claws dangling and milky eyes rolling, and she figures they're not going anywhere anyway. They can wait.

Maybe this thing will fight them for the privilege of ripping her corpse apart.

Well. She'll do some ripping of her own first.

Her boots splash in rainwater thick with grime as she finds a firmer stance and lifts the knife, the runes on the sterling blade caught and thrown into dreamlike relief by flickering neon. She has no idea if the silver is going to do anything, no idea if it's all just stories, if the whole thing is just one big fucking lie, but if it's true this will burn like hell before they _disarm_ her - literally, right? - and anyway...

"C'mon," she breathes. Hisses rise from behind her, hyena-laughter. Crazed as she feels. The thing in front of her is growling like thunder and backing up but it's clearly not thrown by her. Not at all. It's backing up to charge, canine head lowered and massive shoulders rippling, and when its lips peel back from its gleaming teeth she sees incisors as long as her hand.

She's not scared. She really isn't. It's been a long time since she had anything to lose.

"Come the fuck _on_." She's impatient. No idea what the fuck it's waiting for, what the things behind her are waiting for, no idea why she isn't in bloody shreds all over the alley's blacktop floor. She brandishes the knife - okay, yes, she failed, she failed them all, but she can't help that now and there's no point in angsting over it - and spreads her arms. "I'm right _here!_ "

She realizes the horrors behind her have ceased their cackling half a second before the dog-thing lunges.

There are things you realize without realizing. There are things that become apparent to you all at once and in every important way, but you only figure it out much later and after a lot of other stuff has happened. It's like that with his beauty, it's like that with the fact that _it_ is not an _it_ at all, and it's like that when it lunges and doesn't lunge at her. She's sure it has, ducks her head and squeezes her eyes shut and readies herself to slash with the knife at the same instant she readies herself for the feeling of her guts spilling all over the cracked tar, but somehow she already knows it wasn't coming for her. She feels a warm breeze, the heat of it as it hurtles by her, the caress of fur on the outside of her forearm, and she smells something indescribable - canine, yes, the smell that somehow attaches itself to all dogs, but also _not,_ musky with blood and the faintest edge of decay, sweat, and something she fails to identify, at the time, as cigarette smoke.

And something else under it all. Sweeter. Still thick but fresher. Something that makes her want to break into a run that has nothing to do with fear. She will never identify that smell as any one thing.

Except him.

She turns as it passes her and watches, stunned to paralysis, as it slams into the first of the three and sinks those hand-long canines into a patchy-hide shoulder, rips its head sideways. Drops of black blood scatter into the air and the thing releases a bubbling scream that's still horrifically like laughter, raises its scythe claws and rakes them down the dog-thing's foreleg. Flash of torn flesh through the black forest of its fur, bright crimson streaming into that black, and somehow over the snarls and screams of the others she hears the patter of the blood as it hits the tar and splashes into the thin puddles of rain.

The horrible thing is half the size of the dog - _wolf, it's a wolf_ \- and she's initially sure it must be an easy fight even with three against one, but then the other two throw themselves onto its furry back and grapple, claws flashing like volcanic glass knives, their rows of jagged teeth smeared with gore as they bite and bite and tear, and now that they've started back up with their awful laughter they refuse to stop. The wolf-thing rears and staggers, lets out a growl that has far more in common with a roar, reaches clumsily back and swipes at them. Its paw catches one and flings it down and Beth hears the burble and crunch as that paw crushes its ribcage, but the other one is still clinging, shaking its flat head furiously from side to side, and more blood is showering through the beams of neon like nightmare rain. The first one the wolf took down is rising, jaws wide; one of its arms is dangling loose by a thin shred of meat but the other is raised and its claws catch the wolf in the flank, rip and peel back a long strip of fur. It has time to do that before the wolf bites through its neck and jerks sideways and sends its head rolling behind a dumpster.

But the third one is hanging on. And the wolf-thing is weakening.

She could run. It comes to her in a rush, the same rush that's bringing feeling back into her limbs, tingling her fingertips with adrenaline. This is perfect. Two of the monstrosities taken down, one _definitely_ very dead and the other one probably so, and if she's lucky these two remaining things will take each other out. Either way they're both preoccupied. She could run and get away, and she's hurt, still bleeding freely even if her own pain has faded into a dull background throb, but she'll be okay.

She should run. She really should. She bites down on her lip. The knife feels like it's dragging her arm toward the ground.

She runs.

Not toward the mouth of the alley. She's not thinking. Thinking now might get her killed. She clenches her legs like springs and they sent her into the air and she's already stabbing, clawing her way up through thick fur - _soft,_ how is it so _soft_ \- until she reaches the naked thing still biting into a frenzy as the wolf bucks and snarls and tries to shake it off. There's no way she should be able to hang on. No fucking way. But she does, and she feels her own hard grin as she slashes the thing's side open, ripping it all the way around to its knobby spine, black blood and gray flesh and sickly pale bone all gone pink and orange and red in the rear window's neon.

 _Budweiser. Budweiser._

It catches her attention as she slashes again and smells burning hair, burning skin, the silver melting its way open. Screams, not glee but agony. Its muscles seizing, narrow frame convulsing and finally knocking it free with the force of its own spasms. Her blade is still deep in its shoulder and she goes with it, landing under it with an impact that explodes the breath out of her, cold wet soaking through to the small of her back and the thrashing weight of the thing on top of her, the stench of its blood and fear and surprised rage. She doesn't hesitate, still isn't thinking; she kicks it off her with strength that would surprise her if she had any mental space for surprise, and before it can recover she flips herself and pins it with a knee in the center of its back, slices open the side of its throat and watches blood jet over the blacktop with detached interest.

She's not even here. She's very far away, hovering above the whole thing. She smells smoke. Heat of flames on the back of her neck.

Laughter.

She falls back onto her knees and almost drops the knife. She doesn't. She keeps hold of it. It's what she does.

She holds on.

Abrupt silence except for cars passing at the far end of the wide alley, a few distant voices. Two on a Thursday morning in northwest Atlanta, but even though it's not exactly loud out there, in here it's unnaturally still, as if they've slipped sideways into a nearby but faintly delineated other universe, something into which people can come and go but where not everything fully penetrates. Because this hasn't exactly been quiet, but no one is coming. No sirens. No indication that anyone out there has any idea that anything even slightly weird has just happened. Anything at all out of the ordinary.

Monsters and whatnot.

She heaves in breath, ragged around the edges. Whatever chemicals were suppressing the pain are bleeding out of her. Literally, maybe.

She could still run. Stumble, anyway. But she turns, looks to her right, and there's the wolf-thing, lifting itself onto its hind legs, forelegs - _arms,_ they really are arms - wrapped around itself. It puffs, moans. Drools bloody foam, its tongue lolling. It swings its eyes toward her, and she perceives a gaze both piercingly blue-

And deeply intelligent. Nothing like the mindless hunger she was facing down before.

A total absence of malevolence.

She watches, speechless, as it staggers toward her, still standing upright. Like this, it's easily seven feet tall, maybe more, looming over her. She should be running; she should also be terrified. Those teeth. Considerable claws of its own. It could snap her in half like that proverbial twig.

She's not.

It whines, wavers, and falls - collapses, hits the tar with a deep thud that shakes her, and curls in on itself, shaking.

Slow, every movement deliberate, she pushes herself to her feet.

The pain is worse with every step she takes. She's pretty sure she's still bleeding. But all her attention is locked on the wolf-thing in front of her, and as she stands and stares down at it, it begins to change.

She's never seen anything even vaguely like it. As such, she can't really process it. Her brain observes but makes no sense out of what it's observing. There isn't any sense to be made. It simply _is,_ is happening before her eyes, and long ago she at least got beyond assuming she was insane every time she sees something like this.

It arcs, twists, and as violent shudders wrack its muscles the air fills with the sound of cracking bone, cascades of it, someone heavy-footed stomping over sticks. The fur thins and seems to _recede,_ black transitioning to pale bare skin stark in contrast. The long, narrow snout packs itself into the shrinking skull, teeth pulling in on themselves. It breaks apart and remakes itself, reforms, and she pulls in a slow breath as it subsides into the naked body of a man awkwardly crumpled halfway into one of the bigger puddles, streaked with gore, face hidden by a tangle of hair dark as the fur.

Okay.

She has options. She can freak out. She can still run. Freaking out and running are not mutually exclusive. She could, before she does either of those things, go to him and grip him by the hair, yank his head up, and slit his throat.

Because sure, he looks like a man now. But he's not one. No fucking way. And right now, as far as she's concerned, that's more than sufficient cause for killing.

She bites her lip and makes her way over to him, slips the knife back into the sheath at her belt and crouches beside him.

He's not moving. Maybe cutting his throat would be redundant.

But she lays a hand on his back, fingers grazing deep, ugly slashes extending down to his ribs from which blood is still seeping, and feels the expansion and contraction of lungs at work. Shallow, but there, rasping under her palm.

He moans. Shivers.

And she knows she's not going to kill him.

She lifts his hair out of his face. She still can't see much through the grime and the gore but she makes out a sharp cheekbone, scruffy facial hair, blunt nose. The muscles under her hand are corded, thick, powerful. He's smaller like this, yes. He's hurt. He's weak. Could be dying.

He's still dangerous.

She sighs and combs a hand into her damp hair, shoving it back from her brow. Her hands are both filthy, but it's not like her hair was in good shape. None of her is. The whole thing is a fucking mess and has been for over a year, so at least this is familiar territory.

She takes hold of his upper arm, shakes him. He groans, tenses, but otherwise there's nothing.

"Get up."

Nothing. She shakes him again, harder. "Get up or I'm leavin' you here."

Because if he can't walk at least sort of on his own, there's really nothing she can do anyway. And she knows better than to bother with 911.

He lets loose another groan, louder, a little more of himself behind it. That's good, probably. She slides her hand under his bicep and tugs, lifts. "C'mon. I got stuff back at my place, I can..."

Can what? Sure, she remembers everything Daddy taught her and has had many opportunities to put it to use, but are _stitches_ really going to be enough for this man? This _creature?_

Well. She can only do what she can do.

She presses her other hand under his middle, feels more planes of muscle across his stomach, and as she does he twitches and mutters something she can't make out.

She leans in. _You idiot. You idiot, it could be a trap._

But if he was going to kill her, he could have done it long before now.

"What?"

But then he's shaking her away, trying to push himself up, and before his arms can fold under him again she has him, grunting with the effort, helping to lift him. They make it to his knees and he half falls, leans against her, and somehow she can bear him.

He repeats it, shifting his legs. Trying to get them under him. This time she gets it, though she doesn't understand. Like everything else here, it makes no sense at all.

"Whatever," she mutters, and hauls him to his feet.

He's completely naked. Once, not very long ago, a farmer's daughter in the full of her seventeenth year would have smiled nervously and blushed and looked firmly away, twisted a strand of her hair between her fingers. Now that same farmer's daughter, orphaned and aged the span of both a year and a lifetime, observes this fact for all its practical implications and moves on. Yes, he has a normal-looking dick. So he appears human in that respect too.

She manages to shrug off her jacket, ties it awkwardly around his waist. It looks ridiculous. Fortunately that doesn't even vaguely matter.

His head is lolling back and to the side as she helps him to the mouth of the alley. Her apartment - her room - is three blocks from here. It'll suck, it'll make everything hurt so much worse, but she can make it and there's Vicodin waiting for her along with everything else she'll need. In the meantime there's something surreally pleasant about the solidity of him, even if he can barely walk. The strength beneath the weakness - weakness she's almost certain is temporary. She doubts he's actually going to die.

His heat. Even the smell of him - canine, bloody, smoky.

And something else.

Out of the alley and onto a street thinly traveled in the small hours, cars passing only now and then. They have to be getting looks; that also doesn't matter. It's nice when things don't matter. It's simpler.

Her life has, in many ways, gotten very simple.

But this feels like a complication.

She's an idiot. She is a complete and utter idiot for this. She should have left him. But maybe not all of that farm girl burned away a year ago, because there was no way she was ever leaving him there. Not even after what he said to her. It didn't necessarily mean anything anyway. He might not even know where he is. What's happening. What's going on. Might be that all he can understand is his own agony, which must be significant.

Nevertheless, he said it. And when he said it and he met her gaze, his blue eyes were clear. Desperate.

Frightened.

 _Don't._


	2. when I'm rolling with the punches

**[Note:** Just a quick note/preemptive apology: this is clearly set in Atlanta, where I have been all of once in my life. Twice if you count the airport. I'm trying to get as much right as I can, but I apologize in advance for any stupid and/or obvious mistakes. In fact, if you spot one, please let me know so I can correct it. **]**

* * *

 **Chapter 2: when I'm rolling with the punches**

She was right. It sucks.

She's right about a lot these days.

It's a second floor walkup - a single room and a bathroom over what might charitably be called a thrift store - and by the time she gets him to the bottom step her side is like a burning seam of coal eating into the rest of her, as if she didn't have bruises and cuts just about everywhere else. But she doesn't have the luxury of feeling the pain, and even if those wonderful dulling chemicals are all gone, she has her mind and what she can do with it. Her sheer power to ignore, which she's learned not to underestimate.

She has him to focus on, and maybe that helps a little.

He's still barely walking on his own, but what he's doing is better than nothing. He's not exactly towering over her anymore, not exactly a mountain of fur and muscle, but he's still considerably bigger than she is, and she can tell - as she shoulders the heavy door open and looks up the sallow-lit, narrow stairway with gritted teeth - that if he was dead weight she would have to leave him where he fell no matter how much mercy she felt like bestowing on him. But he's present enough to help her, and as she starts to drag him up the stairs, one at a time, he braces a hand on the wall and pushes.

He leaves handprints behind, mud and blood and other things unspeakable. God, they're both fucking filthy. Before she does anything she's probably going to have to wash at least some parts of him.

She sighs. Before she does anything she's washing _herself_. He's probably not going to die; asshole can wait his turn.

But the instinct is there and now she's freshly aware of it. What she used to feel all the time. Who she used to be. Back when she had enough heart for it.

Back when she was good.

The stairs feel eternal. She thinks of the Bible stories she learned - good girl, her father's daughter, all faith and hope and love - and of Jacob's dream of the Angelic Host forever ascending and descending the ladder to Heaven.

It almost makes her laugh.

But all at once they're at the top and she's fumbling for her keys, wincing as her side twinges viciously, her hand shaking as she tries to slide the right one into the lock. She's only lived here for a couple of months and sometimes she still gets the keys mixed up. It seems like there's so much more to worry about.

The apartment key, and the keys to another building that doesn't exist anymore.

The man seems to have lost a lot of the strength he used to get this far and he's trying to hold himself against the doorframe, trying to put as little of his weight on her as possible. He mutters something and she doesn't bother trying to figure it out. She'll assume he's delirious at this point. Assume nothing he says is likely to make sense. If she stops to parse every babble she'll never get anything done.

She shoves the door open and staggers him inside.

It's dark, and the darkness makes the space feel even smaller than it is, and it's already small. Little box with a drop ceiling and cheap fake wood paneling, pitted floor painted a bizarre red that sheds flakes everywhere, sticks to her bare feet. Single grimy window, barred. Card table by the old kitchenette, every surface of the latter painted with decades of grease-spatter. Double bed in the corner, springs that scream when you look at them. Dresser missing two drawers, rabbit-ear TV on top which sometimes wants to fuck with color and more often refuses. Couch barely big enough for her, let alone him - and of course that's where she's going to put him. No fucking way does he get her bed. Whatever remains of that girl from before, there isn't enough of her to force this Beth Greene to extend that much kindness.

And her bedding is clean. Old and threadbare but clean. The couch is brown, dirt sealed into its fibers, patchy in a way that now reminds her of the hides of the things from the alley.

She reaches over to a switch on the wall and flips it. The single overhead light flickers to sullen life, and all of this is revealed.

He moans.

"Yeah, I know." She grunts and pulls him toward the couch. "It's not exactly the goddamn Hilton. Deal with it, it's better than the alley."

She drops him, half expects him to break the couch when he lands - not that she'd care much - but he catches himself on one of the arms and lowers, face twisted with pain. She stands and watches him, hand drifting to her wounded side, and for a moment - as he tries to curl in on himself again, as the cruel slashes across his flank stretch and reveal tiny flashes of pale rib under the ooze of congealing blood - she feels something that isn't merely the ghost of dead charity.

This man - this _thing_ \- saved her life. Whether or not he meant to is irrelevant; the practical effect is that she's still breathing. It's not that she thinks she owes him. She doesn't approach the world that way anymore, has long since decided that it's yet another of the many things she can't afford. But he did save her.

This isn't about gratitude. But maybe she can make it about balance.

He's bleeding all over her couch.

She bends over him, studying. Then, straightening up, she pulls her shirt off over her head and leans in again, bunching it up and pressing it against the wounds. It won't do anything for the others but these are the worst.

"If you can hear me, hold that there." She takes his hand, lifts it, settles it against the shirt, and when she releases him he stays where she put him. So there's that, at least. "I'm gonna take care of myself. Then I'll deal with you. Try not to die or anythin'."

Again, once upon a time a Beth Greene who no longer exists would have been mildly mortified to be standing here in her bra, nipples hardening in the chill of a room with no heater to speak of. But this man is semi-conscious and she's already gotten a fairly decent look at his dick. Yet another thing that doesn't matter.

Good. Simple.

She turns away from him and stumbles to the bathroom.

* * *

There's a kind of calm to be found in the ritual of first aid and she sinks into the prospect of it, feeling her heart rate and breathing slow and the tension slip from her muscles. She strips and turns on the shower, makes it as hot as she can - not all that far above warm - steps under the spray and lowers herself, groaning, into a crouch. One good thing about this place, one of the very few good things: the water pressure is amazing, and it massages her skin in blunt needle waves that remain just on the right side of uncomfortable. They clean her, beat away the filth and the blood, and she drops her head and watches the water spiral pinkish-brown down the drain, then light pink, then almost entirely clear.

She doesn't want to get out. But she does.

Gingerly, she dries herself, makes a feeble attempt at blotting her hair - a nightmare of ferocious knots that she might deal with some unspecified time in the future if she can summon up the strength to give a shit - and rummages in the cabinet for her first aid supplies, sinks onto the toilet seat to see what needs doing.

The damage isn't as bad as she had initially feared. The bleeding from the cuts in her side has almost entirely stopped, and everything else - scratches on her arms, one slightly deeper down the outside of her left thigh, bruises everywhere - appears superficial. She decides her side won't need stitches - good, because trying to do them would be awkward as hell given the angle - and she cleans them, bandages them, moves onto the others.

She'll just have to trust the things weren't carrying any fun diseases around with them. She's well stocked with meds but anything they might have given her would very possibly not respond to conventional antibiotics.

There's a lot she couldn't ever and never will be ready for.

She sits for a moment, stuff scattered on the stained tile all around her and her head lowered, fingers tangled in her hair, then pushes wearily to her feet and turns to gather everything up.

She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and pauses.

It's not the first time this has happened - a glimpse at just such an angle and in just such light as to make her own face strange to her. She always looked so much younger than she was, used to be bothered by it - at seventeen she could have been fourteen, fifteen, and people who didn't know her usually assumed so - and that's still true. Her face is still rounded, sweet little mouth still perennially curved into a near-smile, eyes big and doe-ish, but everything else stands in contrast to it. Those big doe eyes are sharp. That sweet little mouth is bracketed by the beginnings of lines, and not lines from smiling. Her full left cheek is bisected by a long thin slash of a scar, matched by another on the right side of her brow. There's a tense set to her jaw, as if it's constantly clenched, because for the last year it pretty much has been.

She was a pretty seventeen when the world ended. Now she's a hard eighteen, and she can't see nineteen being much kinder to her, or any of the other numbers after that.

It's nothing to cry about. She doesn't cry anymore.

She pulls the medicine cabinet open, searches through bottles and dry swallows a Vicodin, flips the damp coil of her hair over her shoulder, and goes out to deal with the thing who looks like and is absolutely not a man.

* * *

She hadn't bothered with a towel and she comes out of the bathroom naked, her arms full of her supplies. She hadn't been fazed by stripping to her bra and she isn't fazed by this - she's only as naked as he is - and she dumps the contents of her arms onto the card table before plodding over to the dresser to get some clothes. On the way she shoots him a glance and his eyes are open - only halfway but aware, and watching her. She narrows her own eyes, but really she still doesn't care.

"Perv."

Not that she's sincere. He's not looking at her like that. He's looking at her like he's not even here.

He closes his eyes.

She drags on sleep shorts that hang off her hips and a tee that hangs off all of her, moves to a bottom drawer and pulls out some old towels, goes to the kitchenette and takes out a battered pot and fills it with water. All of that done, she returns to the couch and sets it all down on the floor, lowers herself to her knees and looks him over.

His eyes are still closed and he's shivering again.

And he's changing.

Not all the way. Not - thank Christ, because she's not sure how she would deal with that in the most practical terms - into what he was before. But in part, in places - his bare skin sprouting black fur, black stubble, fading again, soft cracks as his hands lengthen and thicken and the beginnings of claws extend from his nail beds, his back bowing as the base of his spine bulges into something she can tell might become a tail. His muscles swelling, rippling, subsiding. His ears, and his nose, jaws - longer. Vaguely snout-like. Then shrinking back into themselves.

His teeth.

She watches this for a moment, thinking. He's not controlling it - that much is abundantly clear. He doesn't appear to be conscious at all. There's no reason to assume he's dangerous.

There's still no reason to assume he isn't.

She hesitates another few seconds - then gets up and goes back to the bathroom, bends and scoops her knife off the floor, takes it back to him and kneels again, unsheathing it.

And for a moment she just holds it, staring down at it as the hard overhead light throws it into illumination.

The light is hard, yes. But the knife takes it, does something with it that's impossible to define. It always has - no matter the light, no matter the setting, the blade pulls in the light and transforms it, pumps it into its angles and its lines, pools it in the curves and dips of the runes etched into the blade, until it looks as if it's lit from within. Pulsing gently.

Should be impossible. Should be bullshit. But the same is true of a lot of things that persist in being real, and this man in front of her is just the latest addition to the list.

She doesn't know what the runes mean. She doesn't need to. She raises it, holds it close to him, and with cool deliberation she presses its edge to the side of his throat.

The effect is instantaneous - burning hair, burning skin, his flesh glowing angry red and beginning to sizzle. He jerks, eyes snapping wide, and a noise somewhere between a yelp and a howl bursts out of him. He bats at her, frantic - but weak, and it's not hard for her to pull out of his reach.

She waits, holding the knife, for him to calm down. And he does, pressed back against the back and arm of the couch, legs drawn up and the jacket come untied and tumbled onto the floor, her blood-soaked shirt with it. He pushes up on his elbow and glares at her, one hand against his throat, eyes narrowed and teeth bared.

Not outrageously long incisors. But they're a bit too long to be normal. Even with his face in what she guesses is its fully human form, he looks decidedly canine.

Feral.

"The _fuck,_ " he hisses, and a paw of a hand flies up defensively as she raises the blade again.

"It hurts you," she murmurs - more to herself than him. Good. Good to have that established. He doesn't seem much like the things in the alley, but in this respect they appear to have something in common.

"Oh, you was testin' that?" But he still sounds more surprised and more pained than seriously angry. " _Bitch,_ you-"

"Shut up," she says - calm. Tired. God, she really is so damn tired. "I'm gonna take a look at what they did to you. You make a move, you do anythin', I stick this in you. Alright?"

For a brief moment he doesn't respond at all, merely continuing to glare. But his eyes are unfocused, his muscles trembling, and he sighs, lies back and uncurls his limbs.

She has no reason to trust him. Nothing solid she can point to, anyway. Nothing conclusive.

But she does.

She lowers the knife and peers at his side again, pushing his arm out of the way - and stops, staring at it.

It's better.

Not a lot better. The cuts are still deep, still very ugly, deep inflamed crimson around the ragged edges. Still clearly painful. But the bleeding has almost entirely stopped, and around the inflammation is a tiny ring of shiny pink skin.

New skin.

She flicks her gaze up to his face. He's looking back at her, trying to keep her clear, trying to keep himself clear. He won't be able to do it for much longer. He's struggling to keep his eyes open.

"We... I- I heal quick," he mumbles.

"No kiddin'." She purses her lips and looks down. Okay, sure. Quick. No reason to not clean and bandage anyway.

So she does.

He hisses again when she starts wiping away the blood, but it's just a sharp little inhalation, and almost immediately after she feels the consciousness flow back out of him, the muscles loosening under her hand. When she swabs him with disinfectant - which should sting, a fuck of a lot - he doesn't make a sound. Doesn't even twitch.

And his uncontrolled partial transformations have ceased.

She finishes with him and rocks back on her heels, dropping the roll of gauze and running a hand over her face. So now she has a naked monster passed out on her couch. Naked, powerful even in this form, covered with scars - she notices that, now that she's not focused on his fresher injuries. Tonight is only the latest round of something that looks like it's had many iterations.

They're vicious. More vicious than what was just done to him. Her gaze slides down his body and she bites her lip, wrapping her arms around her knees.

All at once she doesn't feel old - not the way she has all this time. She doesn't feel tough. She doesn't even feel eighteen. Nothing makes sense and the world is so huge, so dangerous, and even if she's not technically alone right now she feels like the last girl on earth.

The last human girl.

Daddy. Mama. Maggie and Shawn. She can't miss them right now. She can't afford the luxury. She squeezes her eyes shut against the burn. Because no, fucking no.

She doesn't cry anymore.

"Alright," she whispers. "Okay." She scrubs her palms against her eyes and it doesn't help, that's somehow such a childish thing to do, but she can't stop it and she stumbles to her feet, taking the knife with her. The rest of the stuff, she'll worry about in the morning. She needs to sleep now.

If she can. She's exhausted to the point of collapse, but she knows better than to assume that means she will.

She's just turning toward bed when she stops, looks back down at him. He's still limp, eyes still closed, but he's shivering again, and a soft, dog-like whine drifts up through his throat.

Powerful. But not.

And he saved her.

She goes to her single tiny closet and gets a blanket from its top shelf, crocheted in a complex spiralling pattern of green and blue and white. It smells like a stale basement, like mothballs so old they probably attract rather than repel, but once it didn't.

Once it smelled like a fresh breeze sweeping in across a field, grass, sweet hay. Once it smelled like the fabric softener her mother used, like the lotion she gave her daughter when dry winter air itched her skin.

It used to be like that.

He's still filthy, still a stranger, a _monster,_ and it's too good for him. She shouldn't.

Tonight she's done all kinds of things she shouldn't do.

She takes the blanket to him and shakes it out, drapes it across him and steps back, swiping once more at her stinging eyes. She shouldn't, why the hell should she-

 _Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares._

This is no angel. But it's her father's voice. Daddy, soft and calm and strong as he ever was, Bible open in front of him, her hand in his. She always felt so safe when he did that.

She felt the presence of God.

She turns away and cuts off the light, goes to bed, strips back the covers and curls up beneath them, pulled in tight on herself with the knife still clutched in her hand, and stares into the dark. Not full dark; the lamp across the street tosses sickly light into the room, broken into stripes by the window's bars. They don't touch her but they stretch across him, and she can see him clearly, turned onto his side with his hair half fallen in his face.

He's not shivering anymore.

No, he's not an angel. In fact there _is_ a word for what she's pretty sure he is, and it's nothing like an angel. It's a monster. He's a monster.

But he saved her. And when he leaped down like that, when he threw himself into the air in that high arc, all that strong grace...

Nothing makes any sense. Nothing has made any sense for a year. She long ago stopped expecting anything to make any sense ever again. She's in another world now, where monsters roam and hunt and dance and laugh in the moonlight, and no one can see them but her. She's in that world and she doesn't think there's any going back now.

Even if she did, she's not sure she would remember how to live there.

 _But he was beautiful,_ she thinks as she drops toward sleep after all. Arms open for her, an embrace as warm and dark and soft as fur. _He was. He was so beautiful, then._

This time, her mind is kind enough to spare her dreams.

* * *

 **[Further note:** The Bible verse quoted is Hebrews 13:2.

Here's a creepy little fact: the bit about Jacob's dream of the ladder - know what he named where he had that dream?

Bethel.

I had forgotten that until I looked it up. **]**


	3. you'll never live down

**Chapter 3: you'll never live down what you can't forget**

The first thing she sees - the first _things_ \- are his eyes.

She doesn't think she's moved at all since she lay down, since she fell asleep. She lies on her side in the near dark before dawn - at some point in the night the streetlight seems to have burned out - and stares across the room at him, and he stares back. In the dimness he's all shadow, barely an outline sitting up on the couch, and she wouldn't know he was looking at her at all if it weren't for the green-gold mirror shine of his retinas.

He blinks, slow, and it flickers.

This is yet another moment at which, she figures, she should be scared. She should be gripping that fucking knife so hard her knuckles crack. And she _is_ gripping it, but with none of the shaky intensity of near-panic. She's holding it, she'll use it if he comes for her, but he's not.

He's just _looking_ at her, head slightly tilted at an angle that somehow manages to convey totally bestial curiosity.

She would wonder if he can tell she's awake, but that would be stupid, so she doesn't. Eyes like that, he can probably see her twice as clearly as she can see him. At least.

No, she's not scared. And she doesn't feel like that's just her being stupid again. This is the smallest of the small hours, where thoughts can run in strange and dreamlike directions, but she also doesn't think she was ever at any point stupid, with him. Saving him wasn't stupid. Bringing him home and helping him wasn't stupid.

Covering him with the blanket wasn't stupid.

Now he's sitting up and looking at her, and she meets that mirror gaze without a flinch. Waits. And as she does it comes to her - so vividly that for a few seconds she's almost sure it's happening - that he could change right now, rise into that creature she saw in the alley, towering and massive with teeth longer than the blade of her knife, claws nearly as long...

And soft fur. Fur she - in the strange small hours - wants to run her hands through, lean her cheek against. Feel the coil and release of the muscles beneath it.

He doesn't change. If it weren't for the eyes he would look perfectly normal. And after another moment he shifts under the blanket and grunts softly, clears his throat, rubs a hand against the side of his neck. It doesn't take her more than a second or two to realize that he's rubbing where she burned him with the silver, and she wonders if that wound will heal slower than the rest.

"Can I use your bathroom?"

Her brow furrows. She wonders if she heard him right. It's a very normal question, so normal it hurtles right over the line into completely bizarre. That he would _ask_ if he can _use her bathroom,_ like anyone she's given permission to crash on her couch for a night.

Well, what exactly did she fucking _expect?_ That she would need to put a leash on him and take him out?

She has to bite back a laugh.

"Yeah," she whispers, because what the hell, is she going to say no? Why, except to be an asshole? Yeah, whatever. She's already given him just about everything else she can, short of pulling him into bed with her.

And she's thinking about that, in that dreamlike pre-dawn kind of way, as he gets carefully to his feet, the blanket falling past his waist and to the couch, and turns away from her. She's looking at the hard lines of his arm, his bandaged side, the thick and sharply defined muscles of his ass and thighs.

The deeper, uglier scars slashed down and across him.

It's been a long time since she felt arousal in response to much of anything - the world hasn't given her a whole lot of room for that - and that's not what she's feeling now. Not quite. But her gaze remains locked on him as he walks to the bathroom and shuts the door behind him. The light flicking on through the crack beneath the door, the toilet flushing, the sound of running water. The sink, then the shower, and the slight change in the hiss of the spray as it alters to accommodate the presence of a body.

This is _so_ fucking weird.

At least she's more certain than ever that he's not going to try to kill her. Not even going to hurt her.

That leaves a lot of other potential problems.

She closes her eyes and drifts again.

* * *

This time when she opens them it's into pale morning light and she's still lying where she was, covers tucked around her shoulders and the knife held against her chest. There's the cool of a fresh breeze stroking across her face and hair, and as she blinks, waiting for focus to return to her, his shape comes into view. He's leaning one-handed on the window's bars, light framing him in a way that makes him look somehow two-dimensional from this angle, like a cardboard cutout. One of her other towels - a solid light pink - is wrapped around his waist. The window is open and the glowing end of a cigarette is just visible through the ragged fall of his dark hair. He removes it, blows smoke. She can tell without being able to see his face that he's moody.

It can't be easy, she thinks groggily, being what he is.

She sits up, slow, and instantly regrets it. She didn't hit her head, not as far as she recalls, but it's pounding all the same, throbbing in time with every single muscle, every fiber hot and indignant and making sure she understands the full extent of its feelings. She lays the knife down at her side and covers her face with her hands and releases a hollow groan, and when she drops them into her lap and glances over at the window he's looking at her.

His side is still bandaged. Other than that, and aside from his scars, he looks basically fine. The burn from the blade is a partially visible thin red line. Healing, though as she thought it might it seems to be healing more slowly.

He says nothing.

"Mornin' to you too," she mutters, and shoves herself awkwardly out of bed, wincing a little at the fresh wave of pain. She wavers, catches herself on the wobbling bedside table, and when she raises her eyes to him she could swear she sees his nostrils flare like a scenting animal.

Nothing he does along those lines should surprise her now.

Limping, she moves toward and past him, heading for the bathroom. Painkillers first; then the rest of the world. One thing at a time, and she is _not_ equipped to deal with him or with this while her body is trying to dismantle itself from the inside out.

She doesn't feel feverish, so that's a point in the day's favor.

She yanks open the cabinet, gets the Vicodin, and this time she dry-swallows two. Fuck her body weight and the consequences; she just doesn't want to feel like this level of shit. She feels like she barely slept. Passing out again might not be the worst thing.

But she doesn't suspect she will.

Back out to him. He's gazing out the window and he doesn't look down at her as she draws up beside him. She regards him in silence for a few seconds, then plucks the cigarette from his fingers and slides it between her lips.

He does look at her then, brows drawn together, and she lifts the cigarette free and exhales at him. "You didn't ask."

He shrugs, appearing to allow how that's so.

She leans back against the wall beside the window, one arm pulled in across her breasts, and smokes for a few minutes. Daddy would not approve, no one in her once-family would, but Daddy isn't exactly around anymore and neither are the rest of them, and not long after they stopped being around, she discovered that there's something about the quality of this particular smoke that she finds perversely comforting. When she sucks it into herself, it's like there are flames in the pit of her gut, and maybe it's that when they're in there she can contain them, they're part of her, and they can't consume anything else of hers. She controls them.

Maybe it makes it all better. For a while.

She closes her eyes, holds the smoke in her lungs and feels the burn working its way up her throat and into her sinuses. It prickles but it smooths out all her edges. It makes everything feel just a bit more manageable. It and the Vicodin. "So," she murmurs.

He shoots her a quick glance. She doesn't need to see it. She can feel him, the air he displaces with the movement.

"What?"

"You wanna tell me what your next move is?" She opens her eyes, turns, extends her hand through the bars and taps ash out over the sill. "I'm guessin' if you were gonna do somethin' to me you would've done it already."

He snorts, something like a laugh but not there, run through with another emotion she's having trouble pinning down. "No. I ain't gonna do nothin'."

She nods, taking another drag. It's smoked most of the way down to the filter but she can't find it in herself to be irritated. "Why'd you do it?"

He looks at her again, and this time his gaze lingers - sharp, penetrating. She's placid beneath its pressure. "Why'd I do what?"

"Help me."

He doesn't answer her immediately. He swings his attention back toward the window. Outside it, morning traffic and people are moving past the sad little commercial buildings - check cashing places, an old pharmacy, a 7-Eleven on the corner down the street, rows of dilapidated bungalows further up. Scrubby trees, scrubby grass - scrubbier with late fall. His face is impassive, but his eyes aren't. She can't see directly into them, but going by what she _can_ see, his brain is going a mile a minute behind the flatness and the silence.

Finally he shrugs. His fingers are twitching a bit, as if they want to be doing something and have nothing to do. She regards him in her own silence, then pushes the cigarette back between her lips and goes to the card table and gets another one, brings it to him with her lighter and holds both out to him. He looks down at it, up at her, down at it again.

Takes it with a single nod.

"You look better."

He grunts.

"Said you healed quick."

Another grunt. Long drag, long streaming exhale through his nose.

"Said _we_ healed quick."

He jerks his head around to her, mask slipped, and the alarm is transparently obvious. So he didn't remember that. What else doesn't he remember? She looks coolly at him for a minute or two, then reaches through the bars and stubs the cigarette out on the concrete outside the frame, lets the butt fall to the sidewalk below.

"You're a werewolf." She laughs softly, shakes her head. There are no words for how ridiculous this is, the sound of that word and the fact that it's coming out of her mouth and the fact that she's standing next to one, but she doesn't need any. She doesn't need to describe her own world in order to live in the damn thing. "Don't say you're not. Silver doesn't burn humans like that."

He narrows his already narrow eyes, biting at his lower lip. "Could have a fuckin' allergy."

"Do me a favor? Don't treat me like an idiot. Okay? I'm not one." She crosses her arms over her chest and leans the side of her head on the windowframe. "Forget the silver. I saw you. I saw you _change._ " Because she doesn't know what else to call it, but if there's some kind of proper term for it, she doesn't think she needs that either. This is clear enough.

But he just stares at her - _gapes,_ as if she's said something just the wrong side of unbelievable- and she knows it's not that simple.

Why the fuck?

"You..." He takes a breath, licks his lips, turns to face her more fully. "You remember that?"

No, seriously. "Uh... Yeah?"

"Jesus fuckin' Christ," he whispers, and drops the cigarette.

She bends smoothly, picks it up. She's not sparing the wood for any aesthetic reason, but she thinks the paint might actually ignite. It wouldn't astonish her. She could handle it, she knows she could - she wouldn't collapse screaming and tearing at her hair in an ecstasy of panic - but she doesn't want to have to.

He's still just staring at her. At it. At her again. There's no obvious reason for this that she can see, but God, he really does look surprised.

She proffers the cigarette but he doesn't take it, and she flicks it out the window and sighs. " _What?_ "

"You're not supposed to remember that," he says slowly. "You're not..." He trails off, rakes a hand through his hair and turns away from her, looks toward the bed - freezes and allows his hand to fall loosely to his side. "You had that fuckin' knife"

"So?"

He turns on her, sudden and sharp, and all at once she's freshly aware of how much bigger he is, how much stronger, looming dark over her with the points of his unnaturally long incisors just visible beyond the rim of his lips. She's not scared, she's _not,_ but she swallows and takes a step back, hazarding a glance past him at the bed.

She placed him between her and it. Stupid. No rescinding that judgment later; it was _very_ fucking stupid, and if he kills her now she won't have anyone to blame but herself.

He bares his teeth. "What the fuck are you?"

And this... This is not what she expected. Her mouth drops open but no one easy answer is presenting itself - she's a human, she's a person, she's a stupid little child who should have been lost ten times over, she's a survivor.

She's just another dead girl.

"You got through the goddamn veil." A step toward her, and it's barely perceptible but she sees it: that now-familiar ripple under his skin, darkening as fur comes into being beneath it. His teeth are definitely longer. "You don't just _do_ that. What are you?"

One answer. One of the ones she already found. She bares her own teeth; if she has to, if he gives her even half a second, she'll go for the knife, and if he takes her before she can reach it, she's been living on a year of borrowed time anyway. She should have been dead last night. "I'm _human._ What're you _talkin'_ about? What veil?"

He doesn't back up, doesn't back down, and the faint edges of that encroaching transformation haven't faded. But they also haven't gone any further, and neither has he. He glares at her, his breath deepening and roughening into something more like a low growl than anything else, but when he moves forward again she doesn't get the sense he's intending her immediate harm.

If she tries to run now, it's probably over.

"Hold still. Or I'll rip your fuckin' throat out." He leans in and she can smell him again: smoke and that fainter, musky dog-smell, blood - and soap. Her soap. Fresh, plain. Clean.

She doesn't want to move away.

And then he's _scenting_ her.

His face is less than an inch from her hair, her skin, dragging short, deep breaths in through his nose. He's blasting heat, so intense she has no idea why she didn't feel it before, pouring down on her like summer sunshine. But he's all dark, eyes glittering from beneath his half-closed lids, sniffing at her ear. Her jaw, her neck.

She pulls her in her own breath, holds it. She's not going to shiver. She isn't. She is _not._

Even if she's still not afraid. For some fucking reason.

Abruptly he withdraws, and the subtle change that had begun moving over him washes back like a tide. He's just a man again.

Bullshit. Not _just_ anything.

"You ain't lyin'." Movement at the bottom of her vision; she glances down and he's worrying at his own hands, twisting one finger between his others, and behind the lingering aggression she can see it, feel it, almost _smell_ the anxiety. Whatever the _veil_ is, whatever she's not supposed to remember and why, the fact that she does remember has frightened him.

Badly.

"No. I'm not." This seems like the best chance she'll get and she steps away and past him, heading for the bed - not hurrying. Not running. If she runs he might have to chase her. She picks up the knife and turns, keeping it low but visible. "Tell me what the veil is. Tell me why you're so goddamn freaked out."

He's turned to follow her progress, but he hasn't moved, and as he opens his mouth - maybe to give her an answer but who the fuck knows - the towel around his waist starts to slip and he clutches at it, and suddenly he looks so utterly ludicrous that it seems beyond comprehension that she ever had any reasonto be afraid of him.

She doesn't laugh, but she smiles. He doesn't seem to notice. If he does, he doesn't care.

"You don't remember us," he says slowly. "Your brains... You can't handle it. It's too much. It's easier for y'all to just forget. So people do." He jerks his chin at her. "You didn't."

"No," she murmurs. "I didn't."

And there are so many other things she remembers. Things more than one person has called her crazy for.

"And I dunno why," he adds, quieter.

"That makes two of us." It's good to have the knife. The weight of it is comforting in her hands. But she's sure - again - that she won't need it. She lifts her shirt and slips it beneath the waistband of her shorts, moves over to the kitchenette and pulls open the fridge. Whatever else is going on here, she's hungry.

She can eat and deal with this at the same time, if it's possible to deal with it at all. She can multitask.

"Where'd you get the knife?"

"Family heirloom." He doesn't deserve the full story. Hasn't earned it, and she doesn't feel like telling it. She pulls out a half gallon container of milk, unscrews the cap, tips it back and wipes her mouth with her knuckles.

"Sounds like you got an interesting family." He still sounds completely nonplussed, but also like he's willing to go with it for now. She'll count that as a tiny victory. One to add to the very correspondingly tiny pile.

"I did." She lowers the milk and looks at him, everything in her going flat. "Those things in the alley killed them."

He cocks his head - again, something so essentially canine in effect. "They- those _specific_ things?"

"Those actual ones? I dunno. Could have been there that night. There was a lot of 'em."

"Fuck," he murmurs, and that seems to be all he has to offer for the present.

He leans back against the window. She leans back against the fridge. She holds the milk, he worries at his hands, and they gaze at each other for a moment that stretches out into what feels like an hour.

Might even be.

At last she shakes herself. This is getting her nowhere. She has no idea where she actually wants to go, at least not immediately, or what destinations might be on the table, but this isn't progress of any kind. "I'm Beth."

"Daryl," he says softly. His hands slow, go still, holding onto each other at the level of his waist. There's something about the way he's looking at her. Something she's not sure she likes.

"So what happens now?"

He laughs. It's still soft, and it's very dry, not harsh but almost entirely devoid of humor. He shakes his head, looks away at nothing in particular. "That's kinda up to you."

She frowns. She should probably be used to getting unexpected answers by this point, but here she is all the same. "What d'you mean?"

"I mean you're callin' the shots. Least about some things."

This...

Fuck it, nothing will ever make any goddamn sense again. "What the fuck are you _talkin' about?_ "

"You ain't my pack, girl, and you ain't one of _them._ And you saved my life." He gives her a smile as thin and dry as the laugh, once more with the hints of his teeth at its edges. She wasn't sure she liked how he was looking at her; she _definitely_ doesn't like that smile. "We got rules about that."

"What ru-"

"'s simple," he says, even. But unhappy.

Very.

"I belong to you now."


	4. most people would release you

**Chapter 4: most people would release you**

"What the _fuck_ does that mean, you _belong to me?_ "

It's not that she thinks she heard him wrong. She heard him right. Looking at his face, his hands, all of him, replaying it - and it's not even _that_ much more inexplicable than anything else that's happened in the last twenty-four hours. What he said is what he said.

But _I belong to you now._

That requires some explanation. A little.

Daryl shrugs. It's clearly a discomfort-shrug - a small roll of the shoulders - rather than _I don't know._ "Maybe not totally that. It's..." He sighs, and Beth realizes that what she had taken for unhappiness is actually just nerves. He's anxious. He's doing the thing with his hands again, chewing on his lower lip. Against her will, she's beginning to find it slightly cute in the most bizarre possible way. Here's a man who's probably capable of picking her up and hurling her across the room, who can apparently transform at will into a seven-foot-tall tower of claws and teeth and muscle, and she's making him anxious.

"You ain't got a word for it." And there's something about the way he says _you_ that seems to stretch the distance between them, and suddenly it's like she can almost see the outline of what he might become. "It's like... You saved my life. So my life is yours."

So this makes a little more sense. She's not at all sure that it's sense she _likes,_ but it's enough to proceed with for the moment, and she slides the milk back into the fridge and faces him, crosses her arms again. She feels better that way. The floor feels more solid beneath her.

He really is very big. She's sure he's bigger than he was fifteen minutes ago. Bigger, and with that shadow of potential fur lingering under his skin.

"So what _is_ your word?"

" _Scyld._ " He glances away, at nothing in particular. "It's... Debt. Kinda. I'm your... _scyldig._ "

"What's that mean?"

He looks back at her, and his jaw is set. Still not unhappy. Not really. If Beth was forced to guess, and thank Christ she's not, she would say he's feeling a lot of things at once and not all of them agree with each other.

"Servant." He pauses. "Slave."

She blinks at him. What she saw last night was _real_ and she has the pain to prove it, but she's half ready to scour the room for hidden cameras because this just absolutely _can't_ be...

"You're not."

"Am."

"Well, okay, I-" She breaks off into a breath that punches its way out of her, and as it does her side twinges sharply. Apparently the Vicodin is doing some lying down on the job, and she presses the heels of both palms against her eyes and groans.

Daryl says nothing.

She drops her hands. "What if I don't _want_ a slave? Jesus _Christ,_ you can't just- This isn't-" Sentences. Complete sentences. They don't need to be coherent, they just need to be finished.

"Don't matter if you don't want one. You got one." The towel is starting to slip again and he grips it with both hands. "It's not a rule. It's a law. Old. I break it, I lose my pack. Honor. I lose everything."

"So I'm _setting you free._ "

"You don't get it," he says, and now he's speaking almost gently, still with that storm of confused emotion raging behind his eyes but a strange kind of calm settled over his voice. "I don't got a choice. You don't got a choice. You saved my life. My life is yours. 's just how it is."

He stops and simply looks at her, really _looks..._ And she can't look away. No one has ever looked at her like this before. Like they're helpless.

Like they need her to not be.

"Long as I'm breathin', I'll be by your side."

Silence. Silence for a while. Once again she feels like he's waiting, and once again she's at a complete loss. A year of bullshit, a year of agony and nightmares and screaming and not being believed, of therapists and medication and _structure_ and running, running and hunting and surviving, holding on by her fingernails, clawing her way up the ever-steepening incline of eighteen, feeling her life narrow to a single tunnel that tightens and tightens until she knows there's not enough room to turn around, turn back.

A year of that, and now a man who isn't a man at all is telling her that he belongs to her.

Beth lowers her head and combs her fingers through her hair and breathes.

"Okay." _Okay._ "I really need to get you some pants."

* * *

She doesn't have any pants for him. It becomes apparent pretty damn quick that she's going to have to run downstairs and get him some; the ancient creaking woman who owns the thrift store and the room isn't exactly friendly but also doesn't dislike her, and the place will be open by eleven.

It's a little after ten-thirty.

She's calling the shots? Fine. She puts him back on the couch, tosses the blanket at him, grabs a box of Corn Flakes well on their way to going stale and two bowls, two spoons, the milk again. She brings these things over and lowers herself to sit cross legged on the floor, gazing up and studying him.

He seems less anxious. So there's that.

She raises the box. "You eat cereal?"

"Nope. Got raw hamburger?" He shoots her a look. " _Yeah,_ I eat whatever, Jesus."

"How the hell am I supposed to know that?" She fills both bowls, splashes milk in them, hands one up to him. He takes it and eyes it dubiously; he might be _capable_ of eating it but he doesn't look like he _wants_ to.

He can deal. She needs to go shopping, but she's not doing it now.

"So you _belong to me._ " She scoops already soggy cereal into her mouth; she doesn't much want to eat this either, if it comes to that. But now that she's started she's freshly aware of the fact that her stomach is about to claw its way up her throat and take care of itself, since she won't. "Talk."

Daryl swipes milk off his scruff with the back of his hand, eyes narrowing. "'bout _what?"_

"About everythin'." She waves her spoon. She has no idea how to even begin to pin any of this down into some kind of approachable order. "You're a damn _werewolf_ , you showed up outta nowhere, first time I've actually tracked one of those things down, and I'm guessin' you know what they are. Tell me what's goin' on."

She lowers the spoon and simply looks at him, and all at once she's thrown back into the feeling of being younger, smaller, _weaker,_ as confused as she really is - all the time - and can't let herself be. If she gives in and lets it all come...

She just can't. She can't. She won't. She's keenly aware of this. There's no self-deception. She knows she's a mess. All she has to do to know it is look at herself in the mirror.

Look at her own wrist.

"Just tell me _somethin',_ " she says softly, and she hates the way her voice almost trembles.

Almost.

He looks back at her for a long moment, bowl seemingly forgotten in his lap, blanket pooling around his waist. Her gaze is locked on his face, the ridges of his cheekbones stark in morning light that's getting harder with every passing minute, the scatters of blond-going-gray in his facial hair, but she's also seeing other things. How broad he is, the power still humming just under his surface, all those scars. Tattoos - the inside of his arm, his wrist. A demon, and something small. Before, she caught a glimpse of one on his back.

She has no idea how old he is. She should know; he looks like he could be forty, easy. Older. But he doesn't _feel_ like that.

He doesn't feel much older than she is.

Powerful, sure. Dangerous, absolutely. But sitting here like this, he looks just as uncertain as she feels.

"I dunno," he says finally - quietly. "I dunno, I... Shit." He lifts a hand and worries at his chin, flicks his attention over her head at the window.

"What are they?" She moves her spoon aimlessly in the cereal. It's pretty much slush at this point. "The things from the alley."

"You said they killed your family."

"Doesn't mean I know what they are." She takes a breath - _don't, don't let it go_ \- and releases it in something that might be a laugh and isn't anything like that at all. "No one believed me. When I told 'em. They said I was _traumatized._ Goddamn right, I was traumatized. Seein' that. They tore everyone apart. What _are_ they?"

Her voice twists, tight with desperation, and as it happens she realizes she doesn't care if she allows that much to slip. Doesn't care if he sees her that clearly. Because he won't use it against her, that desperation. Yet another thing she has no way of knowing, and yet another thing she knows.

Daryl is quiet again, quiet for a long time, and she wonders if he'll answer at all. Wonders if she can _make_ him, if that's something she can _command_ him to do- But then he's speaking, staring down at the bowl in his hands.

"We call 'em the _Ytend_."

She lifts her head. A name. Somehow that feels significant far beyond a single word. A _name._

Something that has a name is something real.

"Yeetend?"

"Not so much _ee_. _Ytend._ Means... Destroyers. Ruiners." He shakes his head, mouth tight. Biting at his lip again. "Don't matter. Hardly enough of us left to call 'em anything anyway."

So that's something else. She marks it. But it's a distraction for now. "But what _are_ they?"

"We dunno. We dunno much. We know they run in packs, like us. We know they kill. We know they eat. We know they been around a while, know there's a lot of 'em. We know there's more all the time. They're everywhere." His eyes were sharp, clear, but as she watches they fade, grow distant, once more focused over her head and at the window and past the bars, out to points unknown. "On the street. When you're walkin' around. In buildings, sometimes. They like big places. Abandoned places. They like anything dyin'. Rotten. They're scavengers much as hunters."

"But no one sees 'em." She hesitates. None of this is surprising. It's like he's simply confirming something she already knew. "I mean... I haven't seen 'em hardly at all since they killed my family, 'til last night. Why didn't I before?"

"I dunno that either. I dunno how the fuck you remember _anything._ "

"Okay, so..." She almost laughs again, scrubs a hand over her face. She honestly thought she might get answers, and it doesn't seem like that's exactly happening, but now she knows she's not crazy. She _knows_ it. It's the whole fucking world that's crazy, and apparently crazier than she ever knew. "So why were you there? Last night?" She feels her eyes widen as the idea hits her. "Were you _followin'_ me?"

"Saw the thing go in the alley. Saw you go after it. Didn't smell like only one, and I knew you weren't..." He rolls a shoulder. He's digging at the cereal again, lifts a dripping spoonful and slurps it down, makes a face. "Like me."

"I didn't even see you."

"Yeah, you did. Saw you lookin'."

She blinks at him, fumbling back through whatever memories she can drag up. What happened _in_ the alley is clear enough, mostly, but before that... Walking, walking home from her shift at the gas station six blocks away, seeing the thing, following... No one had been around, right then. No people. Not nearby, not that she'd seen. The liquor store itself was closed at midnight.

No one.

"You weren't..." She starts to shake her head- and stops.

Dog. Big black dog halfway up the block, padding along. _Big_ fucking dog. She had noticed it, and then had promptly forgotten it, because more important things seized her attention.

"Easier to get around like that, sometimes," he murmurs. "People notice a guy, dependin'. Stray dog..." He shrugs.

Stray dog. Sure. But one that big... But people forget. Maybe they forget even that. Or don't notice as much. There are rules here, that much is clear - logic behind this, and it might be possible to understand it, but she's nowhere near that. Not yet.

But she could be.

This is as close as she's ever been.

"You said there aren't a lot of you anymore."

He shakes his head. It's ducked, as if he doesn't want to meet her gaze, but she senses no shame. That's not what this is. He just really doesn't want to talk about it. "Everythin's gone bad. For a while now."

"Are they killin' you?"

"Sometimes." He gives her yet another uncomfortable shrug. "More it's just there's... There's fewer of us." He's quiet a moment. "There's me and some others. Less than ten. Round here, anyway."

 _Others._ "Your pack?"

He nods. "Mostly."

"Alright." Because now she's not sure what else to say. To ask. Not that she doesn't have questions; she's practically _exploding_ with questions, hurling themselves at the walls of her skull and spilling into her throat, crowding onto her tongue, but she knows they won't come if she tries to release them. There are too many. There's no order to them. Barely any coherence. They feel like jagged shards in her head. She doesn't know that they would do her much good, even if she _did_ get answers.

She doesn't know what to do. She should, this is what she's been _waiting_ for, and she has no fucking idea.

 _One thing at a time, Bethy. You can't do it all at once._

No, she can't. And the problem isn't going anywhere. Tackle what's right in front of her. That, she can do.

"You can't stay here," she says, low. "I'm sorry, you just... You can't. You can't _move in_ , it's one room and I just met you." A joke. Kind of. She's honestly not sure about that either. "Also you're not human."

He raises his head, gives her the tiniest, thinnest possible smile. "I can sleep on the floor. You allowed to have a dog?"

She opens her mouth, chest suddenly tight - _why?_ But God, it's not like she's short of reasons - but he waves a hand at her. "Alright. I know."

"So you'll... You'll go back. You'll go home."

He nods.

"What if you..." A surge of inspiration. "What if you just don't tell? That this happened? Would they kick you out then?"

He stares at her as if she's suggested the most ludicrous possible move. "I can't fuckin' _lie._ "

"Why not?"

"'cause I _can't._ " He barks a laugh. "I can't lie to him. Ain't even about tryin'."

 _Can't._ Right. Fine. She sighs, elects to give it up as another dead end, and as for the reason behind it, she'll deal with that when she actually has to. This doesn't count. "Who's _he?_ "

He sets the bowl aside, closes his eyes and tugs on the scruff at his chin. Anxious again. Not worried, maybe, but so uncomfortable he's basically about to squirm. It's the questions, she thinks. It's not even just the content of the questions. It's that she's asking questions at all.

Once again she has no idea how she knows this, but she does. It's like she's touching him now. Extending something across the space between them, slipping just under his skin.

"My _eal_." Tug. "Guess you'd say... Alpha? I don't fuckin' know. Whatever, I can't lie." He pauses, opens his eyes and looks down at her, and what she sees in them is almost pleading. _Don't make me._ "Not to him."

And she can't. Not when he looks like that. Can't even ask it, not again, and she senses something else.

It's causing him genuine distress to say no to her. He doesn't want to.

This isn't about trying, no. It's not about intent and it's not about will. When he said he didn't have a choice, he wasn't lying. He really doesn't.

She wonders what would happen if he made a genuine effort to disobey this man. His _eal._

To disobey her.

"So you go back." She shifts. The floor is cold, but she doesn't want to move. Not back to bed, and obviously the couch isn't an option what with the naked pseudo-man on it. "What does that mean for me?"

"Look, girl, I ain't never actually _done_ this." He fiddles with his fingers, hair hanging in his face. "I'm... I'm here. That's it. For now. Not... Not _here,_ but you need me, I'm here. I dunno for what, just... What you want. What you say. That's all I can think."

It, like just about everything here, is not comfortable. But it's enough. She nods, pushes her own hair out of her face. When he's gone she'll braid it. She'll braid it, slow, and that'll help her think.

"How'm I gonna get hold of you? You got a phone?" She arches a brow. "Somewhere?"

He shakes his head.

"Seriously?"

Nod.

"So how, then?"

He frowns for a few seconds, then appears to decide something. He's still frowning. He doesn't seem thrilled with the decision. He doesn't seem thrilled with much of _anything._ She wonders if he's ever thrilled at all.

If he isn't, she can frankly sympathize.

"You got a piece of paper? Pen?"

She gets to her feet, goes back to the bed and opens the bedside table's single tiny drawer, rummages through hair ties and paper clips and old receipts and pennies, a loose tampon, finds a wrinkled pad of post-its and a pen, brings them to him. He takes them, braces the pad on his knees and scribbles, hands it back to her with the pen.

It's an address. She recognizes it - it's a fifteen minute bus ride away. Not the best part of town, but then again, neither is this.

"You live there?"

He nods.

"With him? With them?"

"No. Just me."

"Okay." She folds it into her hand, and something about it is grounding. The edges of the paper, stiff against the creases of her palm. She doesn't want a _scyldig_ or whatever, doesn't want a _slave_ for God's sake, especially not one she apparently can't free - but she holds this and thinks about what it means and it's actually not bad. It's not a bad feeling.

It would be wonderful if she could figure out how she _does_ feel about this. About any of it. It would be really, really nice.

She goes back to the table, picks up her phone. It's five after eleven. She releases a long breath and when she moves to the dresser she can feel his keen eyes following her. She thinks about how she woke up, saw him. How they flashed brilliant green-gold mirrors in the dark.

She manages not to shiver.

"I'm gonna go downstairs, get you some clothes." She looks over her shoulder as she pulls open the drawer containing her jeans. He is, of course, watching her. "And then... You really gotta leave."

He doesn't protest. He simply gives her another one of those single nods, little duck of his head. Something about it is...

 _Submissive._ That's the word she wants. Or it's close.

Anyway, she should be relieved. She _can_ make him go. She can do that much. He's not going to literally camp out on her couch until he drops dead.

She should be relieved. She is.

Mostly.


	5. while she hides the scars she's making

**Chapter 5: while she hides the scars she's making**

He goes. She braids.

She did this before everything went to hell. She doesn't even remember when she started doing it. What she does remember is that long before it became almost necessary, it was something she enjoyed. It was and is about the ritual of the thing: the smoothing of the strands, the division, the over-under-through weaving itself. Sometimes all of her hair, sometimes two braids, sometimes a single one nestled in a ponytail. In the last days, she favored that one.

She still doesn't know why.

She got his size, got him an old pair of jeans, sneakers with the treads worn flat, a t-shirt emblazoned with the Falcons logo that might once have been white in another life and in this one became a sad limp gray. He put these things on. Looking at him standing there, she admitted - only to herself - that he looked less disreputable in the towel.

But he just grunted and muttered a _thanks,_ and when he left it was almost like he was retreating. She stood in the doorway and watched his shadowy form move down the stairwell and thought about how it might look to Mrs. Lorris - proprietress and landlady - to see this decidedly unkempt and clearly much older man coming down the stairs of the apartment she rents to that nice young girl who lost her whole family.

Beth smiled. It wasn't wide and there wasn't much humor in it, even if she appreciated the joke. Such as it was.

Back inside. Just past noon, now, and she sits on her bed, still in her tee and shorts, legs crossed and brush in her lap, braiding without a mirror.

She doesn't need one. It doesn't matter how it looks. This isn't for anyone else.

It's like waking up from a dream. That's a cliche and not a very good one, and she knows it, but it's also the only thing that really _works._ Everything from the alley to when he walked out the door, a dream. He wasn't even there. He wasn't real. But the blanket is still bunched up on the couch. She looks at it, her fingers working, and the swirling pattern pulls her in, dances with her eyes. There's no way she should be able to, not from here, but she'd swear she can still smell him.

Going over to it, burying her face in it - the idea of doing that. It wouldn't smell altogether _good._ He reeked of blood and old garbage when she put it over him. But he would be there, lingering. The rest of that complicated scent. Smoke, leather. Her soap.

He had to have just been a man, though. Just a man. Tried to help her with... What the fuck were they? Muggers, right? Three of them, big men, grabbed her and pulled her back behind the liquor store. She fought but she was outmuscled and outnumbered, and then he came to the rescue, got stabbed in the side-

The thin sun moves a single beam into just the right position at just the right time, and the knife on the bedside table flashes and it's like a slap in the eyes.

 _Wake the fuck up._

Who is that? Maggie?

There have been a lot of voices in her head the past year. The meds never did make them go away. She knew they wouldn't, took them anyway - maybe out of spite, though God knows who she was spiting. Aunt Martha - _not even a real fucking aunt, Mama's cousin who you've met all of twice is not an AUNT_ \- taking her to doctor after doctor. Therapist after therapist. _What do you think you saw? You know that can't be what you saw, Beth. You know monsters aren't real. You saw them because you couldn't deal with what you were really seeing._

Until she gave in, told them all what they wanted to hear, tried her best to be _normal_. But that didn't get rid of the voices. She didn't _want_ to get rid of them. She doesn't.

They're all she has.

Except there's the blanket, wrapped around herself as she ran. And there's the knife, which she doesn't remember taking from the house and which she somehow - impossibly - managed to never let anyone see. And she stares at it, blinking, her fingers going still as the light catches the dull red of blood crusted into one of the etched runes on the blade.

 _That was the veil. What almost came down on you. That was it, just now. You know it's a lie. It's a lie, it's a lie, it's a lie._

 _You know what you saw, sweetheart. You're not crazy. And you're not a fool._

Her fingers start moving again.

He was real. He was here. He did what he did, he said what he said. It wasn't a lie, none of it. He said he was hers and he meant it. So she has a werewolf now, her very own personal werewolf - she almost laughs, almost can't help it - and she has to figure out what to do with him.

No. No, she doesn't. She's tired, logy. Maybe the Vicodin is finally kicking in, bizarrely delayed. She doesn't work until later. She can sleep now.

She releases the braid - not bothering to tie it off - picks up the brush and sets it beside the knife. But she doesn't immediately lie down. Everything in her is aching in a wearily subterranean kind of way and suddenly being horizontal seems like the greatest idea anyone has ever had, but she doesn't.

Yet another thing this past year has taught her: There are times - more of them than you might expect - when thinking everything through gets you absolutely nowhere.

She climbs off the bed and crosses the short distance to the couch, scoops up the blanket, returns to the bed and slips under the covers. The cool air pouring in through the open window is no longer exactly pleasant, but even getting up to close it feels beyond her present capabilities.

She pulls the blanket over herself, over the sheets and single light comforter. And yes, she can smell him, and yes, it's not entirely pleasant.

But it's him. He was real. He was here. Even his heat feels like it's been caught in the spirals, bathing her cheeks and neck, and she tugs it most of the way over her head, stuffs a fold of it under her nose, rough fibers scratching at her lips. Smoke, blood, leather. Sweat. Dog.

Only it's not dog. It never was dog. She's been using _dog_ because it's what she knows, it's the one point of reference that works best for her, but what's filling her nostrils now is not dog. She grew up on a farm. She knows that smell. This is sharper and deeper, _stronger_ , and something in it slips down her throat and into her chest, tangles on the bars of her ribs.

It makes her want to run. From?

Toward?

Not dog. Not at all. Maybe he's hers, maybe he meant that, but this is not a _tame_ scent. This is all wolf, and she saw how long his teeth were. How sharp.

 _But his fur was so soft._

Sleep now.

 _And he was beautiful._

* * *

Wakes up. Something wrong; don't know what. Gets out of bed, out into the hall in her soft flannel pajamas, feels it against her skin, comfort in the midst of the swirling awfulness creeping up the stairs. Thump from below; grunt but no scream. Something falling.

Not late. Not even nine. Didn't feel well. Went to bed early. Now up and everything is wrong, house shrinking in on her, bannister slithering out to coil around her like a slick wooden tentacle. Has to go down and see. Because a shout, beginnings of one, cut off at the roots. Something breaking. Rolling. Cool stairs under her bare feet; hisses from below. House all lit up but wrong, also wrong, flickering red and gold. Too warm.

Laughing. Not her. Not anything she's ever heard.

Rounding the landing. Final flight. Wrongness a cold cloud settling around her, malevolent fog. Wants to show her something and she doesn't want to see, already knows, because this has all happened before.

There should be screaming, this is so horrible and there should be screaming and there's none and that's the most horrible thing of all.

 _Later, though there won't be enough left of the bodies or the crime scene to provide much in the way of evidence, she will conclude that there was hardly any screaming because they were all slaughtered in the same room, the living room - where, of course, the fire started - all at once, and they had no time in which to scream._

Like she's drifting across the floor, her toes dragging, the only part of her allowed to touch the ground. She's not walking on her own; this is a nightmare and its logic is accordingly confined to the logic of nightmares, and some third party - a third _entity_ that might be the nightmare itself - is taking her, bringing her, making her see.

Whispers in her head. She knows this. Has seen it over and over, her own memory relentless. If it was a maze she could find her way through it in total darkness. She knows it all by texture. By touch. Running her hands across the bones it leaves piled in the corners.

Book open on the floor, crumpled pages. But she can read it.

 _And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see._

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Might not really have been there that night. Her brain does revise. Doesn't matter. True is true.

 _Come and see._

Shakes her head like she can shake herself free. But the nightmare is gripping her arms, her shoulders - claws digging into her. Dragging her. Doesn't want to, _fuck_ , no no no, but too late, she's here, now there's blood pooling on the floor and seeping into the cracks between the boards, spreading like some infernal dam has burst, and it's spattered across the walls in wildly complex patterns, dripping from fingers on a hand trailing over the arm of a chair, tangle of gut against the side of the sofa, churned flesh and the yellow of stripped fat, she sees a face half gone and pale exposed skull, eye dangling, tangle of dark hair, she sees a torn throat, ripped tendons like cut guitar strings smeared red, knobby vertebrae, severed outstretched hand hooked where it was used to claw its body across the floor, so much blood everywhere, _everywhere,_ and _them,_ maybe only a few and maybe so many, too many, kicking coals across the hearth and grinning at each other with hundreds of teeth, swiveling bulbous milky eyes around to her and bobbing misshapen heads, chewing and claws dripping, and _come and see_ don't look down but she does and Daddy's head is at her feet and staring up at her, neck ragged flaps of skin, white remnant of spine so bizarrely clean, and his lips are still moving and she knows he's still alive and he can see.

 _Later they will find her with it, kneeling in the grass with the fire roaring behind her, her face streaming blood, and she will be gazing wide-eyed and blank at the fire-stained dark, cradling her father's head in her lap. She will fight the EMTs who try to take it from her. She will scratch at them like a rabid cat. She will bite one. They'll call her a_ crazy little bitch. _She will note this with all the vicious detachment she imagines a_ crazy little bitch _might feel._

She sees all of this because she has to. She sees it because she can't forget. Can't make herself and doesn't want to. She knows what happened. She's the only one who does. Doesn't remember anything after this, but this much is clear.

Someone will remember. It'll be her, because there quite simply is no one else.

She doesn't scream now. She finished all her screaming a long time ago. This is a nightmare, it's like her brain being skinned alive all raw and bleeding, but it's also a ritual of observance. This is her memorial.

She looks at the things cavorting in the living room and feeding on her family, playing with them, playing with the fire, and now practically _beaming_ at her as if she's a long-expected and delightful guest and they're so happy she's here. She burns this image into her mind so she'll know them when she sees them again.

Know exactly who they are when she kills them all.

* * *

She's hurting again when she wakes up into the low light of late afternoon, hurting as she stumbles groggily to the bathroom, hurting as she gets into the shower and slumps under the hot spray and waits for it to wake her. An hour until she has to be at work - though Axel, in spite of occasionally being a bit creepy with her, is a generally decent guy and not hard on her when she's a few minutes late - and not a lot of time to pull herself together, but fortunately the evening/night shift at a gas station in a shitty part of town isn't something she has to be particularly _together_ for.

Getting up and going to work like everything is normal. Which she's been doing for a year, so this isn't so different. She can fake it. It's all she's been doing.

She bends down to get the soap and her side whines. She clenches her jaw, fights back a whine of her own even though there's no one to hear. The slashes don't look red around the edges, anyway. If she was going to have trouble with infection it probably would have been evident by now.

The soap. The smell of it comes to her - fresh without being fruity or floral - and she thinks of him standing right here, handling it, suds over his palms and fingers, rubbing it over his skin.

 _Get your shit together._

She blinks into the spray and hauls in a huge, shuddering breath.

This is weird. This is beyond weird. She hasn't thought along anything remotely like these lines since that night when her life was cut in half, and it's frankly disturbing. And it's just that it's a weird twenty-four hours, she's not thinking straight in general, she has far more reeling around in her head now than she can hope to process quickly, but anyway.

Anyway, he has to be at least twice her age. And he's not human. And he's...

She leans her head against the cool tile and watches the water run down her thighs and circle the drain. _Cut it out. Cut it out right now. Right this minute, young lady._

 _Young lady._ Isn't that a laugh, Mama.

Yes, it is.

At some point she drags herself out of the shower, dries and dresses, pulls her boots on, slides the knife and sheath onto her belt and makes sure her sweatshirt - making do without her jacket, which is in no state to wear - is obscuring it, jerks the brush through her hair and ties it back and calls it a day. She doesn't bother checking herself out. There's a mirror over the bathroom sink and it's the only mirror in the place. She's tried very, very hard not to care about how she looks.

She didn't use to, either. But it was a different kind of not caring. She did beautiful things for herself, pretty things, and they were just for _her._ Not even really for Jimmy, back when Jimmy would talk to her, look at her, go near her at all. She took a deeply private pleasure in it. Like the braids. Little items of jewelry. Nail polish, matte and glitter. Sometimes makeup - never very much, she didn't like the way it made her skin feel.

She lost her jewelry and never replaced any of it. It didn't seem to matter. The only thing now...

It's new since then.

Before she walks out the door, she makes a final stop by the dresser. There's not very much on it - a couple of worn paperbacks, a newspaper she can't even remember why she has, a glass that's needed washing for a few days now, other stuff - and she grabs one of those things.

Black leather cuff, plain except for a silver cross on one side.

She snaps it around her left wrist and goes out into the world.

* * *

She's not late. Axel is appreciative. He gives her a sunny smile when she walks in but tones it down when he sees her face and she's dully grateful to him. He's going home; she'll once again be closing. She never minds that - she actually likes it, at least most nights, because the people are fewer and farther between and what people there are tend to be...

Well, they're interesting. Sometimes scary, but she doesn't have the energy or the inclination to be scared by them, and most of them seem to sense that and interpret it as cause to back off, leave her alone, get what they want and make the transaction and go.

It might also be the scars. They probably don't hurt matters.

Axel pauses in the process of getting his things from behind the counter, turns and looks her over. There are times - usually when she's wearing anything at all form-fitting - when he looks her up and down in a way she thinks some women might take a lot of exception to, but this is another thing she doesn't have the energy for, and a week into working for him she got the sense that it's reflexive and he may not even be fully aware that he's doing it. And he's never _tried_ anything, never done anything else, so she's prepared to deal. It could be so much worse.

But now he's not looking at her like that. He has something of a ridiculous mustache and it's drooping slightly in what she takes for concern.

"Y'alright?"

She nods, pulling off her sweatshirt and slinging it onto a pile of empty Pepsi boxes in the corner. She can guess what he picked up on: she's still not moving easily, is favoring her side in a way that must be noticeable. Axel isn't the brightest bulb she's ever come across, in addition to the occasional mild creepiness, but he's not oblivious, and he knows her reasonably well by now. As well as she's prepared to allow anyone to know her.

"Just pulled a muscle. 'm fine."

"Okay. Well. You get any trouble, you gimme a call, hear?" He sounds a little doubtful, still eyeing her, but prepared to let it go and once again she's grateful - to Whatever if not to him specifically.

She hasn't bought into the idea of God in a while now. He hasn't given her much cause to do so.

He says goodnight, heads out, and it's just her alone in a cramped, grimy room coldly lit by flickering fluorescents, narrow aisles of shelves stocked with chips and jerky and candy, porn mags and condoms behind her, yellow-orange city darkness slowly falling outside.

She leans on the counter, nudges aside a rack of gum, and presses her fingertips to her temples.

This is not how it was supposed to be.

She should technically be on an allowance. It's not like Hershel and Annette Greene didn't want to make sure their children were provided for in the case of something unforeseen, some terrible accident, or being torn apart by monsters. But she ran, is the thing. Eighteen then, and technically the distant and unlikable relatives the state appointed as her guardians no longer had any hold on her, and she managed to get to a point where she was pretty sure they weren't actually going to attempt to have her committed, but she had to get _away,_ as completely as possible,and she had already tried one method and it was off the table after that.

 _I don't want to be gutted._

 _I want to go._

She went. She went one night, took a pack and all the money she had managed to save, climbed out her bedroom window and hopped a Greyhound headed for Atlanta. No idea why. It seemed like a natural center, like somewhere from which she could move outward again as soon as she established the correct direction. But she had no idea about that either. No fucking clue what she was doing.

She was stupid. About that, she was. Not crazy, not really a fool, but she lets the grim banality in front of her fade into a blur and she thinks she was probably very stupid to do this the way she did.

She was a fucking child.

The bell over the door jangles. It's a heavyset man with bad BO wanting the latest issue of _Barely Legal_ and twelve dollars on pump number two.

It is what it is.

* * *

But something's started up inside her and she can't make it stop.

All evening it winds up, coils tighter and tighter like a spring around her spine. At first she barely notices it, sits behind the counter and occupies her time by flipping through _Penthouse._ She has a strange and morbid fascination with the porn they stock - another thing she developed without really noticing until it was full-blown and impossible to ignore - and now and then she'll be perched on the uncomfortable cracked leather seat of her little stool, half paying attention to page after page of swollen muscles and swollen cocks and swollen lips around them, enormous fake tits and spread legs and shaved, gaping cunts, various objects getting shoved into them, every single one of these women wearing a mask of what she now identifies as the trademarked Porn Face™ that's meant to convey an ecstasy of overwhelming, desperate arousal and the unbearable need to be fucked by whoever is holding the magazine _right fucking now oh god please,_ and it's like she'll see herself from the outside, hovering over her own head in a living near-death experience...

And it is. It is a near-death experience. In those moments she really sees what's happened to her, this girl who - yes, honestly - was a Good Girl for a while, never missed Sunday School, sang in church every Sunday morning, Bible study with Daddy, beautiful old hymns at the piano with Mama, saving herself for the man she would obviously marry, but also just a _nice_ girl who rode horses, helped work a farm, dreamed about college, snuck out once or twice to go to stupid parties, kept a journal in which she was beginning to write scraps of song lyrics and the melodies to go with them, could bake one hell of a peach cobbler completely from scratch, had a boyfriend she thought she might really _really_ like a lot, and wasn't scared of sex and knew it would probably be great when it finally happened, and wanted it, _thought_ about it, fingers working between her legs until she had to bite her pillow to keep from crying out as her orgasm hit her in a thick, sweet wave.

It was something beautiful. She saw it that way, then. Something wonderful and wild. She looks at these women and it's just...

And it's not only this, of course. It's not only about the porn. It's not just that kind of thing. But it's a perfect example, a model case, and she isn't often disgusted with herself these days because she's doing what she needs to do, but now and then there are times where she wants to turn away and curl up and cry.

Something in her got ripped apart. Something got killed. But after. Only after. And she doesn't think she can ever bring it back.

But then there's _this,_ whatever it is, a spring glowing red-hot and smoldering in the pit of her, and somewhere between the woman who looks like a tired version of one of the Porn Face™ girls and the kid who can't be more than fifteen throwing up what looks and smells like a liter of cherry-flavored vodka by the drinks fridge, the awareness slams down so sudden and so hard that her breath lurches to a halt in her chest.

She _did_ find them last night. By chance, but she finally did. She saw them. They're _real_.

She _took one the fuck down._

And a werewolf says he belongs to her.

She goes through the rest of the shift like a machine, hardly sees anyone when they come in, hardly speaks to them. Her life has narrowed to a clenched little tunnel, yes, but there was always a pinprick of light at the end of it, and she doesn't think that light is a way _out-_

But it might be a way _in._

She didn't bring the scrap of paper with her. But she remembers the address - not sure about one or two of the digits but it's enough. She'll find it.

Or he'll find her.

She closes, locks up. Catches the last bus headed that way. She could wait and do this tomorrow on her day off, except no, she fucking _can't,_ because she's been waiting for this for a _year_ and just because she didn't expect it to come in this form, that doesn't mean it hasn't arrived.

She doesn't know him. Doesn't know anything about him other than his name and what he is and what he can do and some of what he knows, and all of those things are enough for her purposes. She didn't want a servant, didn't want a slave, and she still doesn't, but yes, if he's making himself available to be used she will absolutely fucking _use him._

She'll use him and she'll _end this_. She'll end it, she'll bury this fucking knife and that fucking dream, and she'll go.

One way or another.

* * *

Note: Bible bit is Revelation 6:7-8 (KJV).


	6. shines when the sunset shifts

**Chapter 6: shines when the sunset shifts**

She knew the address well enough to know the general area, to know the right bus. But as Beth leans her head against the hair-greasy window and stares out at the passing landscape, she realizes that there's a lot she didn't know, and it's stuff of some significance.

He gave the address and she thought maybe a room like hers, maybe one of the shitty little apartment complexes scattered here and there, possibly a run-down bungalow like the few up her street, but a block behind, the buildings on either side dropped away into darkening wasteland, scrub and broken chainlink and stretches of pavement half reclaimed by weeds, and in the distance, looming, the hulks of a series of buildings that can't be anything but industrial.

Auto plant, maybe. Closed up. Warehouses.

She thinks about what Daryl said. The _Ytend._ Abandoned places. Dead places. Big. This looks like all three - and this is where he told her to go.

And it occurs to her that maybe this is an enormous con. Or worse. Maybe a lot worse. Maybe she should stay on this goddamn bus - which is slowing, pulling up to a rusty shelter - and circle back around, go the fuck home. That would be the smart move. The sane move. First one she's made in a while, regardless of her own certainty regarding her sanity.

She closes a hand over the hilt of the knife, and when the bus stops she gets up, steps down through the back doors as they hiss open, and she stands on broken concrete under the meager pool of a flickering streetlamp and watches the bus's tail lights as it grumbles off into the night.

And she's alone in the dimness, darkness all around, and silence.

Except not. Because to her left is the street and beyond one of those wide stretches of bare pavement that might once have been a parking lot, a long-closed diner, and to her right is what, in a completely different setting, might be called a meadow. Here it's a broken meadow, sick, lined with plastic bottles and bags and cigarette butts, cellophane and aluminum, glass, a couple of hubcaps. But the breeze is sweeping across it and stirring the brush, the waving grasses whispering, and for a moment longer she stands there with her eyes half closed, and her heart feels as if it's trying to hammer its way out through her breastbone and go back to the fields and pastures where it belongs.

She bites her lip. She's not going to do this now. She's here for a reason.

And where's _here?_ This place is huge. The buildings are huge. She can see the downtown skyline just beyond, lights all around, but it's like they can't penetrate some unseen barrier. She's lost in a sea of dark. If he's here, he could be anywhere.

She could call out. But yeah, no. That's not going to happen.

She takes a breath, lets it go, and begins to walk along the edge of the meadow toward the nearest building.

* * *

She should have brought a goddamn flashlight. In fact, that's a lesson she's going to take from this and hold onto: whenever she's going somewhere unfamiliar - whenever she's going _anywhere_ at night - bring a flashlight. As she draws closer to the building - four or five stories high, boxy, lined with broken windows - she sinks deeper into the shadows, pulls out her phone and turns the brightness up as high as she can. The light it throws in front of her is painfully inadequate, but it's better than nothing at all.

The meadow vanishes. Now she's walking next to something that was _definitely_ a parking lot, and she turns, ducks through a gap in the fence, loops of razorwire above seeming weirdly low, uncomfortably close to her head.

It's like she's passed across another boundary line and moved deeper into the dark, the lights instantly even further away, the light from her phone instantly even less effective. Fresh doubt shoves up through her gut and grips at her, cold, and she stops and glances back, then looks ahead.

A door is now visible - barely. Wide, up a ramp. Loading dock or something. And it's open, gaping, and it's yet another cliche but it looks for all the world like a mouth open to swallow her.

Through one of the third floor windows at the far left end of the building: light.

She freezes. Blinks. She can't see it anymore, but _you know what you saw, Bethy_ , and it was _there,_ and it wasn't just a stray reflection, random scatter of something sourced from somewhere else. It was inside.

This is the kind of place where the Ytend gather. Exactly. Daryl told her, but she also _knows._

 _Run._

But that's not one of her voices. That's not Daddy or Mama, Maggie or Shawn. That's another voice, unfamiliar, and she doesn't trust it, even if what it's saying sounds reasonable.

Even if she knows she should.

Somehow the distance between her and the ramp has vanished in the time it's taken her to think this, and once again she stops at its bottom, looking up at the doorway, one of the thick metal doors propped against the wall beside it and chunks of concrete missing from the sides of the ramp and the edge of the dock. The utter darkness waiting for her.

She looks back. The towers of downtown look like ghosts of a dream. Real once, but not anymore. The wasteland, the ruins - all that truly exists now.

She lifts the hem of her shirt, touches the handle of the knife again - and slides it free of its sheath, grip tight. She took one of them down. He was there, yes, but she took one of them down. She saved him. Little girl saved the monster.

Red Riding Hood saved the Wolf, she thinks, and she smiles thinly.

Knife close at her side, she walks up the ramp and through the doorway and into the dark.

* * *

The first thing that hits her is that it's not actually dark. It's not dark at all. If anything it's considerably brighter than it was outside - which makes no sense at all, so that's comfortably normal given what the last day has been like. She turns and faces the doorway and there's the same total blackness - outside.

Once again - and in a way so clear she's sure it's exactly what's happened - she's passed through a barrier, a _veil,_ and into something removed one step further from her world of northwest Atlanta, much of which is languishing its own kind of disrepair and its own kind of occasional ruin, but nothing like this.

She turns forward and examines what she's dealing with.

She's standing in a cavernous space, shadowy but merely dim, bare dusty floor in front of her and looming, indistinct shapes on either side, a long catwalk directly overhead and another against the far wall. To her left there's a rusty stairway leading up to what appears to be a partial second floor, enclosed, windows running along its length - administration, maybe. Offices.

Flicker of light through a window at the end.

Not her imagination.

She swallows. The click in her throat is clearly audible and it echoes. The building is otherwise silent. Not even the sound of wind.

There's really only one place to go. She pulls in a breath and starts walking again, around and over toward the stairway.

She's partway up it - it creaks and grinds under her weight but seems prepared to support her - when it hits her. A lot of this is exactly as she would have expected it should be: The smell of ancient oil and ancient dust, basement mustiness, the faintest whiff of gasoline, the shadows in which something always seems to be lurking, the emptiness, the quiet, the feeling of desolation. The light - which seems to come from everywhere rather than only one place, emitted from the very walls - is pretty weird, sure. But there are other things, significant things, and all at once she realizes what they are.

There's no trash. None to speak of. Outside, yes, but in here, apart from the thick layer of dust and the scatters of broken window glass, it's essentially clean. And there's no graffiti, at least not that she can see.

It's untouched. It was emptied and abandoned and since then no one has disturbed it. Like a tomb.

She should shiver. But she doesn't. Because that's the last thing, the final strangeness: She should be frightened at this point. She should at least be profoundly uneasy.

She's not.

Wary, sure. Cautious. She's taking these stairs one at a time and she's trying to notice everything, trying to pay very close attention, but she's not scared. This place doesn't feel _safe,_ not in the slightest... But it also doesn't feel like it bears her any particular malice.

At the top of the stairway is another open doorway. No hesitation, not this time; she walks through and into a narrow hallway lined by other doors, some closed and some wide open and some ajar - and at the far end, through a door shut except for a slim crack, a soft and wavering red-golden glow.

She cuts off her phone and slips it into her pocket. Takes another slow breath, settling into herself.

Starts forward.

She doesn't walk silently, but it's close. The floor up here is even dustier than the one below and the dust acts as padding, muffling her footfalls. There's no movement ahead of her or on either side, nothing but that faint light, though she's sure the Ytend can move quietly if they have to - and will she see them? She did last night, but for a while she didn't, if they're really everywhere, and exactly how certain can she be that she'll be able to see them now?

Absolutely fucking certain. That's how much. If they're here, she'll see them.

Because she's behind the veil.

But there's still nothing. She thought before of a tomb and it continues to be as quiet as one. But it's not dead. She was wrong about that. Maybe it felt like that outside, maybe even when she first walked in, but she can feel the difference now. Can't pinpoint what it is, what marks it, and in fact it probably isn't any one thing but an amalgamation. It's usually simple to determine if a creature is alive, but perhaps the life of a place is a more complex matter. The life of a place as a soft light, like the one slipping through the cracked door now directly in front of her.

She lifts the knife and with a single fingertip she pushes the door open, and it swings inward without a sound.

The room she's looking at is cramped, and like everything else here it's dim and packed with shadows. Once it was probably an office; now it seems to have been converted into a spartan living space. A bedroll and a jumble of ragged blankets lies against one wall beneath the single window, the glass in which is somehow intact. Nearby is a small pile of clumsily folded clothes and a couple of books - hardback, she notices, which for some reason strikes her as odd, though she can't make out the titles on the spines. Across the room from the bedroll is a battered propane stove and a stockpile of cans and a couple of gallon jugs of water, one of which is two-thirds empty. The source of the light is a collection of candles burning on a wide tin plate.

At the foot of the bed is a backpack and a crossbow.

She stands and stares at it, at all of it, and as she considers the fact of its existence it comes to her that she's not surprised to see it. She _is,_ she really is, because when she got off the bus it hadn't been what she expected and if anything the unexpectedness has intensified, but she's also _not._

The moment he told her he lived alone, showed her the address, she knew this was what she would find.

And it feels... It feels okay. _Good_ is stretching it, but what should be dismal, like a homeless man's camp - which is what it _is,_ on its face - feels instead like a bizarre kind of haven. If this building isn't dead, this room is an intense little pocket of that remaining life, burning low and warm like the candles. She doesn't know that she would personally call it a _home,_ but someone has made it one for the time being.

He has.

"Beth."

Soft, over her shoulder and just behind her, warmth on the back of her neck. His voice was rough the first time he spoke to her and it still is, but now it's also smoothed out around the edges, and in that single syllable she hears the difference.

She's not sure if she jumped. She might have. Regardless, her breath is a tight knot in her chest, and when she turns and he's standing there at a distance of inches, it tightens even more.

He's looming again, half lost in shadow. His eyes, which she could have sworn were a clear and pale blue, now look pitch black.

"Hi," she murmurs, and manages to take a single step back, plucking the knot loose and pulling in the musty air. His dark eyes flick to the knife in her hand and she glances down, remembers that it exists, lowers it.

He tilts his head the smallest bit, hair falling across his cheek. "What're you doin' here?"

She sheathes the knife. Her heart and lungs have recovered their rhythm and everything feels easier. Sort of. "Lookin' for you."

"Kinda figured. Why?"

His voice is soft, yes, but there's also a tension in it that nearly crosses over into terseness. He's not entirely pleased to see her. Yes, he gave her the address and he had to have assumed she might make use of it, but he looks past her into the room, one hand clenching at his side, and she knows she's done something he would have preferred she not do.

This place is his territory, and within it this room is most fully his own. She came up here without his permission, and she came within a step of crossing the threshold.

 _Den,_ she thinks. His den.

She faces him squarely, grabs his gaze and holds it, and it's actually not so difficult. The darkness of his eyes was an illusion; he's turned a little more into the light and they've lightened with it, and some of the shadows have fallen away from him. He's still looming over her, but there's no threat in it whatsoever.

He meets her eyes. And drops his own.

"I need your help."

He's quiet for a long moment, looking down at the floor between them. Mulling. And it's not a question of whether or not he'll say no. Not if what he told her is true, not if she's read every single iota of his body correctly.

He's just mulling over precisely how to say _yes._

Finally he looks up, his mouth twists, and he pushes past her, shooting her a look over his shoulder. It's not an especially interpretable look. "Alright. C'mon."

Now she's been invited. He still doesn't seem pleased, but if she's walking into his den now at least she's walking into it with his consent, and regardless of what else is going on here, what other power she might possess and be able to use, she does care. About what she does. What she does with him.

 _It does matter._

She follows him in and halts, scanning around, as he moves over to the bedroll and collapses onto it with his knees bent and his forearms resting on them. He lifts one and leans back briefly to root around in the pocket of his jeans for what turns out to be a pack of cigarettes. Not the jeans she gave him; now that he's fully in the candlelight - uneven though it may be - she really notices what he's wearing. Gray jeans, black button-down shirt with ragged edges where the sleeves used to be - apparently he's unbothered by the chill that's settled into the nights of autumn - and what looks like a worn leather vest. Boots.

She finds herself considering what happens to them when he changes. Whether he has a few seconds to strip before it's too late. Whether he just goes through shirt after shirt and pair after pair of pants. Whether being a werewolf is hard on the wardrobe.

Her mouth must be twitching, because he pauses in the act of flipping the top off a thick steel lighter and gives her another look that's almost a glare. "What?"

"Nothin'." She looks around again. "You live here?"

Stupid question, and she can tell he'd agree. He takes a long drag and exhales, looking as if he's trying to summon up his last reserves of patience. Apparently _submissive_ doesn't necessarily mean _respectful._ "Yeah."

Then again, she's getting the distinct sense that what he's tossing her way is in significant part an overactive defense system. He might _believe_ he's genuinely irritated by this, by her presence, while not even a full day ago he was standing in her apartment dressed only in a towel and telling her that _long as I'm breathin', I'll be by your side._

She suspects this might be a complicated man, and the fact that he's not a man is only where it begins.

She folds her arms across her chest, and for a lack of anything obvious to do she turns and wanders toward the little propane stove - which, she sees now with a twinge in her chest, is almost identical to one her father had and used when they all went camping. She scans the labels on the cans - beans, corn, fruit in syrup, chili, all of it serviceable and none of it very appetizing, and she wonders just how much of his diet this stuff constitutes.

Whether he hunts.

She glances back at him. He hasn't moved, smoking and watching her with slightly narrowed eyes. And yeah, she thought the moment she saw it that this place didn't feel as dismal as it probably should, and some part of her expected a place like this, but that doesn't mean she understands.

"Why?"

"Huh?"

"Why do you live here?" Still looking at him, studying. His tension is now tangled with growing confusion.

He reaches by the backpack and picks up an open beer can, taps ash into it. "Where the fuck should I be livin'?"

"I dunno, maybe an actual apartment? A house? Somewhere with electricity and runnin' water?" Her voice has a sardonic bent to it but it's at least half genuine curiosity. If this is his _den,_ if he's made this place his and nowhere else, his reasons seem worth understanding.

She wants to know him. It hits her like a gentle cuff to the head. She wants to know _who he is,_ and not just because she now has a use for him.

He grunts. "There's runnin' water. 's cold but it runs." He blows a long stream of smoke through his nose, gives her a thin ghost of a smile. "Either some sucker's still payin' for it or someone forgot to turn it off."

Huh. "Okay, but _why?_ "

He doesn't answer her immediately. He lifts his free hand and scratches at the back of his neck, once more with that vaguely canine head-tilt, and again she's overswept by the feeling that she can almost _see_ the animal lurking under his human suit of clothes.

"Ain't been here that long," he says at last, as if this explains everything. Which it doesn't, and he seems to know that because he adds, "Ain't exactly been lookin'."

"You don't live with your pack?"

"We ain't all roommates or nothin'." He plucks the cigarette from his pursed lips and pokes it at her in clear exasperation. "You gonna tell me what you need help with, or are we gonna play Twenty fuckin' Questions all night?"

She gazes at him in silence. He stares back, cigarette trembling slightly between his fingers, and he seems to absolutely suck at hiding what he's feeling when he's feeling it deeply, because under the impatience, burning low fire behind his eyes, is something that amounts to _please tell me, I need you to tell me, tell me what you want so I can give it to you._

This is what she holds over him. This is how deep it runs. And for the first time, she thinks she might be starting to grasp just how dangerous it is.

"Those _things_ murdered my family," she says softly. "Burned down my house. Scarred me. Ruined my fuckin' life."

He nods, once, slow. "You wantin' some vengeance?"

"Kinda." She clenches her hands into fists against her ribs. Her side moans and there's something in the pain that roots her to the floor. "That. But I also wanna understand _why._ "

 _Why they're dead and I'm standing here._

Nothing from him, and the nothing stretches out. She waits inside it, gaze locked on him, and he closes his eyes and smokes the rest of the cigarette down.

And opens them, drops the butt into the can, goes into his pack for another. "How'm I gonna help with that?"

"You know about them."

"Toldja, girl. We don't know much."

"You know more than me."

He shrugs and clicks the lighter, little flame leaping into the air. There's a lot of fire in this room, she thinks with a sudden and unwelcome burst of unease. A _lot_ of it, uncovered and dancing and throwing strange shadows at the walls. "Guess so."

"Look, I..." Honesty. She can. She's given him some already, placed a few jagged pieces of herself cautiously into his hands, and he hasn't used them against her, hasn't tried to hurt her in any way. Hasn't done anything of the kind.

Everything he's done with her, every way he's been, has told her over and over that she's safe with him.

She shoves loose strands of hair out of her face and as she does her fingers trail along the scar on her brow, and it's like being cut all over again. Not that she remembers being given the wound this scar used to be. "I've been tryin' to figure this out for a year and I got nothin'. Fuck-all. 'til last night, 'til you. I was... No one believed me, everyone said I was crazy, made me think maybe I _was_ crazy for a while, and then I needed to get out, I needed to _know,_ and I didn't know what to do, I didn't..." The words are coming faster and faster, threatening to flood out of her, and as she listens to herself - mildly aghast - she hears a tremble wriggling into her voice, a tightness that could, if pushed much further, become tears.

But she doesn't cry anymore.

She squeezes her eyes shut, and without her intending it her hand finds the hilt of the knife, curls, grips. "Daryl... Please. I need to know. I need to know what happened to them. I need- I need to know what happened to _me_."

She's expecting another long pause. She's expecting more nothing from him, more mulling, maybe more exasperation. And all at once she feels small and stupid, a kid standing here in a place where she has no business being, a drifter's camp or a beast's den, and trying not to cry. She doesn't remember when anything last made her blush but now her face is hot, cheeks and ears pounding. She's expecting him to scoff, breathe smoke at her, wave his hand at the door. _Get the fuck outta here, girl. What I said, that shit only goes so far. Some things I ain't doin'._

But he doesn't make her wait, and he doesn't scoff. What he does is say, all those edges smoothed out of his rough voice, "Alright."

She opens her eyes and he's looking up at her, and as far as his eyes go, she sees no more impatience in them. No exasperation. No judgment at all. He turns his head toward the shadow in just the right way, the light catching his retinas, and green-gold mirrors shimmer inside them.

"Okay," she whispers, no idea what else to say, her chest pounding with gratitude she has no fucking idea what to do with. Except when he picks up his cigarettes and holds them out to her, she goes to him and takes one and sinks down into the floor facing him, leans in so he can light it for her. She pulls it into her lungs and everything loosens. A little.

Through their mingling smoke she sees his eyes flash again, on and off as he blinks. Looks her over. Multiple times now he's seen him duck his head in response to her eye contact, look down and away, and she knows enough about wolves to know what that means. But now he looks at her like that and it's like a fingernail running up the length of her spine.

"Y'alright?"

She nods. For all intents and purposes, she is. She's as all right as she gets these days.

So for a while they sit there in silence and the silence is almost amiable, something she dares to think might even be friendly somehow someday in some world where a thing like that could happen. The tension that's been laced through the holes in everything hasn't yet unwound itself, but it too has loosened.

He's going to help her.

And she didn't order him to do it. She didn't command him. She just asked.

"So," she says when she's almost down to the filter. Behind her and to her right, the candles are beginning to gutter in their pool of blended golden wax. "What do we do?"

"What we do is I talk to the pack." He reaches for the beer can again, and there's a soft hiss as he drops the butt in and holds it out to receive hers. "I talk to Rick."

"Your... Alpha?" She remembers, and it wasn't that word, but it's all she can think of when she gropes for it.

" _Eal._ Yeah." He swipes a hand down his face and grimaces. "That's gonna be real fuckin' fun."

"Why? What's wrong?" Because something obviously is.

Daryl opens his mouth, stops, lets out a breath and closes it again. He isn't quite worrying at his fingers, but they're twitching at the ends, tapping softly and unrhythmically on his thighs.

"You're human."

"So?"

"So _Scyld_ don't happen with humans. Not as a rule."

"So..." A frown pulls at her brow. Every time she delves into this it seems to get more complicated. Somehow she never expected _werewolf culture_ to be a thing, but apparently it is. "Who, then?"

"Other Hathsta. Other packs. We-"

She mentally skids to a halt, holds up a hand. " _What_ sta?"

" _Hathsta,_ " he repeats, and now his patience sounds genuine. " _Hathstapa._ Or somethin'. Once."

 _Oh._ "Werewolves?"

He makes a face, all undisguised distaste. "Yeah, we don't call ourselves that."

"Okay." A note to make, then. She's not sure what the consequences of insulting one of them would be, but while she thinks Daryl would likely confine himself to expressions of irritation, she doesn't for a minute imagine she can expect the same from another. "What's the deal with me bein' human? Is that gonna be a problem?"

"Maybe. One or two of 'em..." He sighs. "Michonne's probably not gonna like it. Shane's gonna be a prick. Shane's always a prick," he adds, sighs again. "So."

"What about Rick?"

"Rick..." He looks away, over and past her at the last of the fire. The flames dance in his eyes, and suddenly she can't take her own eyes off him. "Rick'll listen," he says quietly. "After, I dunno. But he'll listen." His gaze flicks back to her, quick and sharp, and she bites back a startled little gasp. "You're behind the veil. I dunno how, but you are. That changes things."

She draws her knees against her chest. She should be uncomfortable with this line of conversation, with _his_ obvious unease, but she's not. She's calm, and she's calm in a _deep_ way she doesn't remember being since she got here. Maybe not ever. Not like this.

Something is happening. She's _doing_ something.

"So you're not supposed to do this. _Scyld._ With humans."

He shakes his head.

"Then why'd you do it with me?"

"You saw me," he says, soft again. "You remembered. Toldja. That changes things." He lets out a long breath. "That changes everythin'."

She doesn't know what to say to that. So she doesn't say anything to it at all. She takes it and she holds it, wonders at it - and suspects, not entirely comfortably, that she'll get a very good idea of what exact things it changes.

"When are you gonna meet with them?"

"Tomorrow night." He pauses and glances around, and it seems to her that he's not just looking at the room. He's looking at the whole place, the building and the buildings around it, the broken parking lots and wastelands. "Here."

"Wait." _Wait._ Because now, all over again, she's struck by something that seemed bizarre to her when she first got off that damn bus and seems just as bizarre now. "Here... You said that stuff about _abandoned places_. But that's what this is. It's... It's ruined, it's fallin' apart. It used to be a goddamn _auto plant._ And you're _livin'_ here, and now y'all are gonna _meet_ here?"

He looks at her, wordless, and she would almost worry if it weren't for the almost invisible curve at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. But the seed of one. And the rest of it is plain in his eyes: he's amused by her.

"Yeah," he says after a brief moment. "Yeah, it looks like that. Fools just about everyone. 's what it's supposed to do."

"It's what..." She trails off. She's remembering the feeling of passing across a boundary, passing through some unseen barrier, the darkness closing behind her. The strange distance of the rest of the city. The total lack of trash here, of vandalism, of any kind of destruction beyond what time and the elements would naturally do. The inexplicability of it all.

Except of course it's explicable. It always was. She knew that too.

He shifts, braces his hands on his knees and gets to his feet with a lightness that surprises her, and reaches down a hand. "C'mon. Gonna show you somethin'."

* * *

He leads her back down the hall, down the stairway and across the bare floor and out through the loading dock. Once again there's nothing but thick tar-blackness ahead of her, and once again as soon as she passes through the doorway it vanishes as if it was never there at all, but when she looks back there it is, seething in the building's interior.

 _It fools just about everyone._

He doesn't speak as he moves across the parking lot, strides long, apparently not interested in waiting for her - except no, that's not it. He's trusting her to follow. Assuming it won't be an issue.

So she does. Now and then she has to trot, but she does.

After about five minutes of nothing but flat, shattered pavement, she looks ahead and realizes where they're going. All around them the darkness has been like something vaporous, moving like fog, lighter in some places while deepening to opacity in others. Now they're leaving that behind too, but instead of the sensation of approaching the city the way she left it, she feels the distance increasing, a whole new set of barriers - _gates,_ they're _gateways_ \- pushing back the lights in favor of something very different.

But illumination.

The breeze is picking up. The world in front of them is dense with whispers, and as they step off the pavement and into the grass, she realizes it's not just breeze and it's not just the friction of leaf and stem. There really _are_ whispers, swirling, surrounding them. Her. Nearly inaudible, and she can't make out what they're saying, can't even tell if they're speaking in English, but she moves through them, feels them hooked and clinging to her like burrs, and they don't sound malicious. They don't sound like they mean her harm.

The meadow extends in every direction, every way she looks, and when she glances back the way they came she can no longer see the parking lot, the building where Daryl made his den - and none of the other buildings either. _None_ of them. None of the streetlights, no bright streaks of passing cars, no sign of the faded brilliance of the downtown skyline. Nothing. Nothing at all except the grass - the ground totally devoid of garbage of any kind - and the ripples of the breeze, and the sky.

Atlanta is gone.

"Daryl," she whispers, head spinning as she tries to look in all directions at once, panic abruptly gripping and wringing her stomach, and she speeds up and stumbles when she collides with his back. She clutches at him, gasping, and she staggers again when he turns swiftly and takes her by the shoulders, steadying her.

"I know. I know, it's a mindfuck."

"It's..." She shakes him off, not because she doesn't want him touching her but simply because she's not sure she wants _anything_ touching her. She's fumbling for her knife, but she knows it's not going to do her any good. Not against this. Not against whatever he's led her into, wherever she's allowed herself to be led. She looks up at him, manages to focus on his face, and his eyes are glittering, half shadowed by the fall of his hair.

"Where _are_ we?"

"Doesn't have a name. Doesn't need one. It just is." He steps back, jerks his head in the direction he had been going. "C'mon." And, when she hesitates, "You're safe. Promise."

She does believe that. In spite of everything. She believes _him._

So she starts walking again.

This time he doesn't move as quickly, but she thinks it has more to do with his own private inclination than any consideration he might be feeling toward her. The moonless sky above them is clearing, clouds melting away, and through them are shining more stars than she's seen since she ran, hopped the Greyhound, made the first of a very long series of very questionable decisions. This is that sky she left behind, black speckled with tiny diamond chips, and her head keeps tilting itself back, her face lifting itself up, and she doesn't want to stop it.

Her throat is burning into cracked rawness, chest collapsing in on itself, every extremity _aching_ beneath this sky and everything it is, but she doesn't want to stop it.

And then, beyond him, she sees it.

It's not ornate. It's not grand. It's a circle of standing stones in a diverse array of heights and widths, protruding from the ground like the uneven teeth of someone ancient. Gray in the starlight, rough and pitted and spotted here and there with moss - they _are_ ancient. Incredibly so.

She doesn't think anyone placed them here. It doesn't look like that, despite the near-perfection of the circle. It feels like they were just _here_ one day, just arrived and rooted themselves and remained.

And around them they wove themselves a world.

Daryl stops again, and this time she's ready for it and she doesn't collide with him. She stops beside him and looks, examines as best she can from the distance of yards. The three nearest stones are all a good two heads taller than she is, and as she gazes at them she thinks of the way Daryl loomed in the hallway, loomed like someone who intends no harm but who's bigger than she is and can't help it.

Between them, in the center of the ring - brightly silvered and rendered utterly dreamlike by the stars, even more dreamlike than the rest of this - is a statue of a woman standing erect, arms curved to hold something, hair flowing over her shoulders and down her back and the thick band of a crown lined with what might be the phases of the moon across her brow.

Beth wants to see what the woman is holding. Carrying. She _needs_ to. It slams into her and lifts her feet, beckoning her in every cell. Everything she's done tonight, every fear she's fought through and every doubt she's beaten back, the strength to come here at all and the strength it took to keep going when everything was screaming at her to _turn the fuck around and run_ \- all of it has been leading to this, this moment and this woman, and Beth needs to be _close_ to her, pressed up against her, hands and cheek and lips on pale stone. She _needs_ it, she's going to _have_ it, and she almost falls when Daryl seizes her wrist in a grip so tight her bones grind and yanks her backward.

She yelps, totters, and he catches her against his chest, holds her tighter. Again she can smell him, the smoke and the old leather now predominant, and something hot and tight and _insistent_ is stirring low in her belly and higher all the time, licking up her walls. She wants. She wants so many things. She wants more things than she could ever hope to name, and she wants them with an intensity that threatens to sear her from the inside out, bubble her flesh, crisp her skin. There's fire everywhere in the cool of this alien night and she's burning alive.

She tugs, wriggles, and he curls an arm around her like a steel beam, lips brushing her ear, and that's only making it worse because now she wants to press backward into him. Press and arch, roll. She wants that, yes, and she could have it. She could have it right now. She _could._

Maybe she will.

" _Don't,_ Beth." Harsh whisper - not alarmed, but strained, and a coherent shard of her wonders if he's feeling it too. "Beth. Beth, listen. Listen to me. Look at her. _See_ her, see what the bitch really is?"

She looks. He holds her and she _looks,_ and as she does something seems to fall away from her, tumbling free from her mind and leaving everything clear. Sharply defined. Sharp enough to cut her.

The woman is naked and all full curves, breasts and ass and everything in between, inviting attention and a lot more than that with the tilt of her hip and her slightly spread legs. Beth can't see her face - somehow it's still hazy, still a silvery blur - but now she can see details, and now that coherent part of her understands a little of what happened. What's going on.

The woman's bare forearms are encircled by bands, cords, ropes. Strung around and through the ones on her right are garlands of flowers, petals frozen against her thighs in mid-cascade. The ones on her left are strung with bones, slender and delicate - the bones of birds, small animals, their skulls dangling from her wrist like charms. In her cupped palms she carries a single enormous egg, cracked in the center and beginning to split open. On a belt slung low on her hips hangs the carcass of a hare and a slender, almost elegant knife.

Beth wants to ask. But she'll have to whisper too. She knows.

"Who is she?"

Again Daryl's lips graze the shell of her ear, and the heat in her flares into her ribcage and she wants to moan.

"Eostre."

"Easter?"

Rumble in his chest passing into hers. Laughter. Still strained, but not unhappy. "Close enough."

The need has hit a plateau and settled into a steady, aching throb, and it's almost unbearable. Holding still, allowing _Daryl_ to hold her, the pit of her stomach is a mass of jumping crickets, her bones glittering with sparks. She's hungry, hungry with _all of herself,_ and she can't stand it.

 _In heat,_ she thinks, and what should perhaps be horror only stokes things higher. Hotter. _Christ,_ she _wants..._

And she has to be there. Run through those standing stones and into the circle, because having seen it now, that's the only place in the world she can be.

"She's a goddess," she breathes. Still shaky. "Isn't she?"

"Yeah." His hold on her is loosening, his body separating from hers, and she's filled with the irresistible urge to whimper. No, she wants to be held tighter. _Tighter._ She _needs_ that. Held tighter, held down. Fighting him. _Taking_ something from him, something only he can give her. "Old one. This is her place. She's got her ways of protectin' herself, protectin' it. Maybe she don't get a lotta prayers these days, but she's hangin' on."

Beth would pray. God, she would, get down on her knees and do all the praying this _Eostre_ wants, and she would know how. She knows it in her blood, her marrow - this isn't a ritual she would need to be taught, and _fuck,_ no. _No._ She struggles to focus, wrestles, claws for control at the heavy spinning wings of her own mind. Claws for it and isn't even sure she wants it, because it would feel so fucking _good_ to give in.

"Your goddess." A loose smile spreads over her mouth and makes her think of spreading legs.

"She's got ways," Daryl repeats, still soft. "But someone's gotta be here all the time. Someone's gotta keep watch. 's the old way. Was like that even in the days before everything started dyin'." He pulls her gently backward, hands so strong on her upper arms - maintaining that maddening distance between their bodies, and clearly intending to do so. He knows. Bastard knows exactly what this is doing to her. "So that's me."

He keeps pulling her and she allows herself to be pulled. She's too busy trying to breathe through the boiling thing under her collarbones to fight him even if she was inclined to do so. It feels so _good_ and it hurts so much, and please, _God,_ just make it stop.

"C'mon. 's too dangerous to stay this close. Least for you." He turns her and starts to steer her back into the dark, and she whines but moves her legs, and every step away from the stone circle cools that ferocious heat. It's better. _She's_ better.

She can do this.

But she needs to be there.

The starlit darkness opens up and swallows her.

* * *

She's aware of him guiding her, stopping her, pressing her down to sit in a small clear patch in the high grasses. The breeze has gentled and it combs through her hair, dries the sweat on her skin, and when she closes her eyes and draws it in she smells the heady scent of meadowsweet, the fresher, drier scent of plumegrass. They soothe her, they bank down the coals if not extinguish them, and it's like she's emerging from waking sleep-paralysis and retaking control of her limbs.

"Alright," she breathes. "That wasn't exactly chocolate eggs and bunnies."

"Sorry." He's close to her, warm; she doesn't open her eyes. "I didn't know it was gonna be like that."

"You didn't _know_ it was gonna do that?" Her eyes fly open - he's sitting across from her like he did in his den, studying her, and when her gaze slams into his, all the force of her sudden anger behind it, he rocks back a little, anxiety flashing plain across his features. Serves him the fuck right. "Didn't seem like you were _surprised._ "

"I knew it was gonna do that. I didn't know it was gonna be that bad."

Her hands are clenched in her lap, nails digging into her palms, and she forces them to relax. "You could've _warned_ me."

"Guess I coulda." He cocks his head. "How do you warn someone about somethin' like that, though?" He's still apologetic, still a bit anxious, but he's also sure of his ground in a way he wasn't even back in the building, and it makes sense that he would be.

This is _his ground_ in a way probably not many other places are.

"I dunno." She doesn't. She presses her palms against her eyes and focuses on her breathing for a few seconds more, drops them into her lap when she feels like she can. "So you... You're _protectin'_ that thing?"

He shrugs. "Someone has to. I'm the new guy, I get guard duty."

"They - you - worship her?"

He nods.

"But you called her a bitch."

"My mom was a bitch, too," he says, so utterly deadpan that she's genuinely uncertain about whether or not he's joking.

She supposes he might be both joking and deadly serious.

She scrubs her hands over her face again and tilts her head back, staring up at the stars. She'd thought there were as many as there used to be back home, in the days when it _was_ home, but now she sees that was wrong: there are many, many more, and it's as if there are more all the time, the Milky Way a palely glowing river spilled across the sky. "What _is_ this place?"

"Toldja. Ain't got a name."

"But is it..." She stops, lowering her head to look at him and biting at her knuckle. With him, the quality of the answers she gets appears to depend a great deal on the precise phrasing of the questions. "Are we still in Atlanta?"

"Yeah. And no." He plucks a few strands of grass and begins to shred them between his forefingers and thumbs. "I shouldn't actually've brought you here."

"Why did you?"

His fingers go still and he gazes at her, eyes once again so dark she would swear they'd be black in the light. "You were behind the veil, right?" He gestures with his chin at the grass, the sky, the stone circle just visible in the distance. "Now you're behind the shadow."

Someday - probably not anytime soon but it may come - she'll get an answer that doesn't immediately saddle her with a whole new set of questions. "What's-"

"There's parts of the world don't exist in just one place," he says slowly. "You can carve 'em out, if you know how. Make pockets. Put doors on 'em, go in and out like rooms."

"Someone... Someone _made_ this?"

The corner of his lips curls. "Someone _made_ everythin', girl." He rolls a shoulder before she can respond. "Yeah. Probably. It was here when we got here."

She pulls her knees against her chest again, tucks tickling loose strands of hair behind her ears. Talking to him is helping beat back the last of the heat, even if it's not the least frustrating thing she's ever done. "Who's _we?_ "

"This was all settled," he says quietly, returning to work on the grass. "We came over from the old country, same as your people. But we weren't the first ones here. We weren't the first Hathsta." He pauses, looking down, and while his face is mostly obscured by his hair there's something in the set of his shoulders that feels to her vaguely like shame. "White men weren't the only ones stealin' land."

"Oh."

The breeze rises, whispers between them, and dies away.

"The statue-"

"Built. Old, but ain't as old as the stones." He lets the fragments of grass slip through his fingers. "This place ain't ours. But we'll keep it safe 'til we can't no more. Her..." He nods back at the stones. "Eostre's just a name. She's got plenty. Ones before us had a name for her, too."

"She's dangerous." Said in a whisper softer than the breeze, like she's afraid of being overheard - and maybe she is. If this is Daryl's ground, it's far more Eostre's. If Eostre is real... And yes. She is. Very, very real. Whatever the rest of her nature, that much isn't something Beth can doubt now.

Not with her heat still burning like a dying sun.

"Can't have rebirth without death," Daryl murmurs, and falls silent.

 _Take me back,_ she's about to say - is opening her mouth to say it. This place is lovely in a subtly - and not so subtly - frightening way, the stars and the meadowsweet and the caress of the wind, but it's not her place either, isn't entirely friendly to her, and she doesn't belong.

 _Don't you?_

But that's not what she says. She looks at him, knees clasped to her chest, and whispers, "Show me."

"Show you what?"

"Change." She swallows. Asking him to do this feels like asking him to strip naked in front of her - and maybe it really _is_ like that. What does it mean, for him? What does it mean to have a human girl ask him to become an animal?

And she's not asking him. Not this time.

He looks at her for another long, silent moment. She wondered what would happen if he said no, actively disobeyed her, and now she's wondering if he might actually deny her this and damn the consequences. But then he shifts, lifts himself into a crouch. "Really?"

"Yeah. Really." She hesitates. Commanding him... She could. She has. But now it feels wrong, and more so given what else he's done for her tonight. "Please."

He doesn't move.

Then he does.

It seemed slow before and as if it must be painful, stretching skin and cracking bone, joints realigning. But now it's smooth, quick, and his bones still crack and his body still twists, wrenches inside itself, but he makes no sound otherwise, and rather than tearing as his muscles expand, his clothes _melt into_ him, sinking beneath the fur as it erupts from his hide. In the time it takes her to suck in a breath, he's a mountain of a thing crouching in front of her, powerful beyond anything she's ever seen, narrow head lowered and ears pricked, teeth slightly bared and gleaming, his massive shoulders and equally massive back bent. She looks down; like last night, his hands are arrested somewhere between human hands and paws, wickedly curving claws tipping each thick digit, each longer in itself than her longest finger. His black fur is somehow both unkempt and glossy, and the starlight is catching its ends and turning them silver.

He's a man and he's a wolf. Like his hands, he exists perfectly between.

He's as beautiful as she remembers, and she stares at him and bites at her lip, her breath snagged and trembling on her ribs.

But he's not done. For a moment he's like that and then he's changing again, shrinking, folding back into himself as his forearms shorten into forelegs, shoulders narrowing, muscles thinning and teeth and claws retreating, until a large black wolf is sitting on its haunches in front of her, gazing at her out of crystalline eyes.

She wants to touch him. She wants to stroke her hand over his head, over his back and along his flank. She wants to _feel_ him. She wants to make him real to herself.

She doesn't. She doesn't move. And after another few seconds the whole cycle reverses, and at the end of it it's him again, dressed, crouched motionless as if he never changed at all.

"Your clothes-" As if that's the most important thing.

He lowers himself, sits back down and crosses his legs. "We can make stuff change with us. Not everythin', not all the time. But."

"How?"

"Twenty fuckin' Questions, girl."

" _How?_ "

Another one of those tiny smiles. Tiny - and meant. Real as he is. She suspects he doesn't ever smile unless he means it. "Magic."

Again, she's not sure if he's kidding.

She doesn't think he is.

* * *

He leads her back, and this time she barely notices the passage. She watches the city come back into view with only half her attention, the breeze leaving her, the whispers dying away, the smell of old oil stains and rust reasserting itself. A few yards beyond the boundary of the meadow it feels like a daydream, a twitch of her imagination that lasted no more than a few minutes. A few more and none of it is clear any longer- was there a statue? A woman? Stars - but that's impossible. The stars don't shine like that in Atlanta.

 _Veil._ Maybe she's behind it, but she doesn't think that placement is total.

But there's him. Eyes, teeth. Claws. His size, his power, his warmth bathing her.

His fur.

He stops and she glances around, realizes that they're standing by the gap in the face where she came in. She shakes herself and looks up at him; his eyes are clear again, though his face is half shadow, only one side fully visible through his hair.

"You gonna get home okay?"

She nods. "I'll call a cab."

"Lemme take you."

She arches a skeptical brow, scans the empty parking lot. "Got a car?"

"Not quite." He swings a hand up and touches her shoulder. "Stay."

He heads off into the dark and she watches him go, and for the first time - unsure why - she sees what's sewn onto the back of his vest: a pair of wings, half folded, patchy and old but somehow graceful. Could be an eagle. Probably is. Some bird of prey.

But to her it looks like it could also be something else.

For a moment there's silence. Then a distant grumble and she raises her head; the clouds are low again, freshly threatening, but it didn't sound like it originated there.

It's getting closer.

Light abruptly pierces the swirling shadows, so bright she can't believe she didn't see it before - except she can - and a black motorcycle roars out of the darkness toward her and pulls up beside her, stops hard and idles, and he turns and jerks his head over his shoulder.

"Hop on."

She stares at him, at it, bemused. "No helmet?"

"Ain't gonna fall." He pauses. "Ain't gonna let you. C'mon."

She believes him. No way he can be that certain, and she remembers all kinds of horror stories about people on bikes with their brains splattered all over the highway, but he says she won't fall-

And she goes to him, swings a leg up and over, wraps her arms around his waist and presses herself against his broad back, eyes half closing as she rests her cheek just below the gap between his shoulderblades. Smoke. Leather. Engine grease and sweat and blood.

Wolf.

He guns the engine and turns, swings around over the pavement and through a wider gap, bumps over the glorified sidewalk and hits the road, and they're gone.

* * *

That also is like a dream, and later, lying in bed in the dark, it hums through her mind like an echo of the engine.

She never rode a bike before. Holding tight to him, all hard muscle in the circle of her arms, the mostly deserted streets of the small hours flying past beneath them. When they hit traffic they wove through almost as if they weren't there at all. He controlled the bike with a kind of nimbleness she wouldn't have believed possible in something that looks almost clumsy to her, taking it to a speed that pulled her hair free from its band and streamed it out behind her. She let her head fall back and she wanted to laugh, and she wanted to do what she hasn't done in months, hasn't done since she got here.

She wanted to sing.

It was like another one of those hot coils, winding around her diaphragm, glowing in the red shadows of her, and after she climbed off and fumbled for her keys, got the door unlocked and opened onto her stairs, it was still there. If anything it was tighter, twisting at her gut. Twisting lower.

She didn't hear the bike roar off. She felt his eyes on her until she closed the door.

In her room she kicked off her boots and tugged the rest of her hair free, shook it out, considered trying to force a brush through it and winced at the thought. Her side was hurting again and she didn't see any reason to add to it.

She splashed soap and water on her hands and face, stumbled to bed, stripped off her clothes and crawled beneath the covers, the blanket over her hip. She was exhausted. She expected to be asleep in seconds.

But she's not.

She's curled on her side, staring at the light falling through the window bars, beams of it across the floor. More than once she's thought of a prison and she's thinking of that now, the sweet wind stroking through her hair in the meadow, on the bike, the stars wheeling overhead and the engine growling beneath her.

Growling between her legs.

She blinks, slow, her knees drawn up and her arms tucked against her chest, but she's not cold. Not anything of the kind. Because there's the stone circle, standing there and looking at it and _into_ it, the statue, and the heat flowing over her in a hungry wave. It had been an impact then, and it had been everywhere in her, confined to no single location and her need everywhere in her as well, but she had known what it was, what it could be, and as her teeth close on the edges of her tongue it gathers against her spine and gushes down, floods her lower belly.

Pulses into her cunt.

She draws a shaking breath and squeezes her eyes closed.

She wanted this. She _wanted_ it, wanted it so bad it nearly tore her apart from the inside out. Wanted to rip off her clothes and charge naked into the circle, fall into the grass before Eostre's idol, spread her legs and plunge her hands between them. Her fingers. _Attack_ herself. Exult in it, in her pleasure, and that would be a prayer.

She hasn't come since she ran. Has barely even touched herself. Somehow that part of her shut down. Now she rolls onto her back and pulls in another breath, shivering, a soft whimper escaping her as she slides her hand down her body and over her mound, the tight curls of her bush.

She hasn't done this. She hasn't, and it's been hibernating inside her, and now it's awake with a vengeance.

She spreads her thighs slightly and grazes her fingertips over her lips - over more slick wetness than she can _ever_ remember feeling - and her gasp is a fist at the base of her throat. Back up, stroking, finding the hardened little nub of flesh nestled high between her folds, pressing, and as electricity crackles up from her tailbone she snaps her back into a low arch and whines.

It's been a while, yes. But she hasn't forgotten how. Like riding a bike, she thinks, and releases a strained laugh that falls into a moan as she pushes a fingertip between her lips and nudges them aside, and it's like she's opened floodgates and more wet flows out of her and drips over her knuckle and between her fingers, down into the crack of her ass. This time her moan is almost words, desperate, and she presses her finger lower and finds her entrance, circles it and twitches her hips upward, her cunt suddenly a starving mouth trying to suck _anything_ into itself.

All at once she's in _deep,_ deep as she can go, and she closes her other hand tight and reflexive over the little swell of her tit, nipple peaked hard in the crease of her palm. She withdraws, hears the muffled squelch, sobs and kicks at the covers until she's exposed and splayed on her narrow mattress, cool air puffing across her burning skin and doing nothing to chill it now. She rocks her hips up and pulls her finger free, circles her clit, slides lower to collect the juices spilling out of her until they run down the back of her hand.

It's the idol, the grass and the breeze, but it's also that roar between her legs, the night rushing past her and the muscle pressed against her belly and chest and trapped by her thighs, and she braces her hips up with her bent legs, tilted to allow her to fuck even deeper into herself, the wet, rhythmic smacking sound of her hand almost louder than the breathy groans shoving their way out through her throat, every teasing pinch of her nipple careening her toward the edge up to which she hasn't gone in months.

Like now she can. Like something has broken open in her. Like part of herself has been returned to her, and it's so fucking _good_.

But it's not enough.

She can feel it, how she's dancing along that edge, fucking herself harder and faster and getting nowhere further. She pulls her lips into a grimace and whines again, jerks her finger out of her cunt and rubs furiously at her clit, and it's not enough, it's _not,_ all her muscles wound tight and straining and that final leap still out of her reach.

What she needs.

She practically throws her body sideways, flips herself onto her stomach. She's moving entirely on instinct as she yanks her spread knees beneath her and thrusts her ass into the air, her tits swinging and the side of her face jammed into the thin mattress, groping her hand under her and fucking back in with two fingers scissoring, curving, searching for the rough place at the top of her wall and hooking into it. It's clumsy but yes, fuck, _this,_ just like this, juices trickling past her wrist and sticky down the insides of her thighs. So _wet,_ spread so wide open, wet and lifted high and _ready,_ ready to take-

Dark behind her. Looming. Hot and massive and wild, reaching for her. Close.

Soft.

She comes like someone's punched her in the gut, biting frantically at the groundsheet, barely managing to muffle her scream as she humps herself up and down, convulsing, fingers pounding into her spasming cunt. And it's so good.

And it's not quite enough. But it'll do.

Her hand drops onto the mattress. She stays where she is, spine bent into a severe downward bow, heaving, still wracked with shudders. Dazed. Staring at the barred light and blinking slowly.

 _In heat._

Oh God.

She closes her eyes and crumples onto her side, lies still for another moment or two with her tangled hair spilled across her face. Then, only half conscious of it, she lifts her slick hand and parts her lips for her fingers, sucks the salt-sweetness off them. Licks at her palm. Savors.

Her side should be fiery agony, but it's only a dull ache. Everything is lost under the warm, gentle throb of her cunt, her quiet sigh as she cleans her juices from her hand.

This part isn't complicated. This part is very, very simple.

She's wrong about that, of course, and she knows it. But it _feels_ simple, and she settles into it as it settles into her, reaching down and fumbling for the covers and pulling them over herself. Months and months of need have been at least partially satisfied. She'll sleep now. She doesn't think she'll dream.

She pulls the knit blanket higher. As she lifts her lids and catches one last glimpse of the room, she sees the spirals out of the corner of her eye. Breathes in, and it's still him.

She wonders how long he'll linger.

She sinks into deep, dark softness.


	7. all the tin can buildings

**Chapter 7: all the tin can buildings rattle the sidewalk**

It's gray again when she wakes, and the quality of the light is such that for a few moments she just lies there, staring at the dark-banded blotchy squares of the ceiling, blinking and trying to figure out what day it is and when and trying to remember...

Trying to remember anything. And it's not that she thinks there might not be anything there. It's that there's so fucking _much._

She turns onto her side, gropes at the covers, and her fingers graze the knit blanket and it acts as a way in, an opened door - an opened _floodgate,_ and out it spills so sudden and so hard and so fast that her breath collapses into the cavity of her chest and she gasps.

She went. She went to him, found his den. Told him - not everything, but she told him enough. He said he would help her. Rick. The pack. Tonight. Before she walked away from him he caught her wrist and muttered a time. That was all, no other hint of an invitation, but she took it as she knows it was meant: information for her to use. Like his address.

Not that he had seemed totally pleased to see her then. And going by what little he told her, what little she's been able to understand, if she shows up tonight he's not going to be totally pleased this time, either. But he'll be expecting her to. And she should. The sheer insanity of this whole thing aside, she should meet these people, these _Hathsta,_ and if Daryl is really going to do this for her, she should be able to make her case to them just as she made it to him.

With less in the way of trying not to cry.

She fumbles for her phone, squints at it. It's almost one. Fine; this is her day off. Spending most of the rest of it in bed sounds just peachy.

But now that she's awake she knows she won't be able to sleep again.

She tries, though. She tries for almost an hour and she slips in and out of a shallow doze in which half-dreams are lurking, uneasy things full of roaring darkness and the dull sheen of bloody claws. She manages to dodge them, but when she rises back into consciousness they leave her feeling tired, almost sore with frustration, and finally she shoves the covers back and groans to her feet, stumbles naked to the bathroom.

She glances at the mirror just as she's stepping into the shower. She's a wreck, her hair a wild tangle of a halo, scars standing out darker than usual, the pits under her eyes apparently impervious to any rest she's been able to snatch. But there's something else, a strange kind of glow suffusing her cheeks, and a moment later, water streaming down her shoulders and thighs with her forehead pressed against cool tile, she _remembers,_ and a violent shiver grips her from tailbone to skull.

His body as he changed - changed _for her_. Then the bike. Pressed against his back, her arms around him.

The statue. The ring of stones, the goddess. Pressed against him then, too.

Later. Her bed. Her hand, her fingers, how fucking wet she was. And a huge shadow moving in the dark. Moving toward her. Ready to _take._

And her ready to be taken.

What the _fuck._

She wrenches herself away from the wall and takes a stumbling step backward, nearly slipping, hands reflexively flying to her mouth and covering it as she stares wide-eyed at nothing. She was thinking. She was. About. That.

Him.

She can't go any further than that. She might have. It's there in her mind and she could reach it if she wanted to, let it wash hot over her. Drown her. She hasn't felt this in over a year, hasn't _wanted_ anything even remotely like sex, but it was pounding through her in the dark, needing to be _fucked,_ and in that darkness her mind placed something so big and so close, and hungry. Sharp of tooth and claw.

Soft fur against her skin.

 _Holy Christ._ This is not any of the voices she normally hears - because hearing voices is normal for her now. This is _Jimmy's_ voice, the tone he never used with her but which, by the end, she could tell he was thinking, because Beth Greene was out of her mind and ranting about monsters, unstable, maybe violent because she clawed and bit the EMTs trying to help her, drew blood, and why would anyone want to be _near_ her much less _be with_ her. _Holy Christ, you are really fucked up._

 _You want to fuck an animal._

 _And isn't that so Porn Cliche™. Farm girl, after all. You have to at least have thought about it. Once or twice. Come on, admit it. You know you did. Now you're sick enough that all the walls are down and all the rules are gone, and you can't ever be normal again, so that's what you want now and that's all you_ can _want, because you couldn't come until you had your ass in the air,_ presenting _like a fucking bitch in heat._

She shakes her head, takes another clumsy step back, is once again briefly sure she's going to fall, catches herself with a hand scrabbling at the slick tile. She. No. No no no, God, _wasn't it bad enough?_

She gropes for the tap and twists it so hard she thinks for a second that she's broken it, but the water cuts off and she climbs out dripping, reaching blindly for a towel, standing there with it loose in her hands and no idea what to do with it.

She doesn't cry anymore, but now she's all stricken panic, and that might be about to change.

 _You know that's not what this is._

Another new one. Very new. Very familiar now, rough edges smoothed out, lips almost grazing her ear. She jumps, whirls, and for a nightmare-shard of time she's sure she's going to see him there behind her.

But of course it's all in her fucked up head.

 _No. Get a hold of yourself. Yeah, you're fucked up. No, it's not like that. Go further. You can do it._

 _You're safe. Promise._

She sinks down onto the cold toilet seat, still clutching the towel against her chest, and closes her eyes. Goes back. Sees him crouching there in front of her, all dark and strong, and _changing._

Not in the same order this time. There's him, a man, and she stares at him and feels it rising, heat in her, desire. What he has. What he can give her.

Then reshaping, shrinking a little, narrowing and lowering into the head and shoulders and flanks of a wolf and _only_ a wolf, and she looks at it, at _him,_ and she feels...

She wanted to touch him, then. She wanted to stroke his fur, feel how real he was. Frame his head with her hands, lay her cheek against his back.

But that's all. He's beautiful like that, but that's all.

Then again, his flesh shifting, growing, rising and swelling and rippling with muscle, thick clawed hands, teeth, powerful shoulders, forearms that could crush her bones inside her skin. That glossy fur. Utterly human eyes, yet nothing like any human eyes that have ever existed, boring into her as if he can rip her apart with them alone.

And there, _there,_ heat flaring, sparks gusting into flame, _need_ so intense that it twists at her muscles, aches in the pit of her belly, and she squirms and whimpers as her hands wring at worn terrycloth. It's not just her cunt, that heat. It's her gut, her lungs, the pounding of her heart, pulse thrumming in her throat and between her ears.

It's everything. Every part of her.

 _There, see?_

 _Sorry, girl. Might be easier in some ways if it_ was _that. This is a_ fuck _of a lot more complicated._

She releases the towel into her lap and buries her face in her hands.

Some of it might be relief. But not all.

* * *

Eventually she gets back in the shower. The panic has bled out of her and an exhausted kind of calm has settled in its place. Okay, so she still might be in some trouble here. Probably is. But it's not that kind of trouble. Whatever else she's up against in a mind she barely recognizes a lot of the time, it's not a hitherto-unconscious bestiality fetish.

At least not exactly.

Regardless. She has to put it away. She can't do anything with it and if she's going to be close to him at all it's only going to be a distraction. He's not human. _Her_ being human is apparently problematic. He seems to be constrained by a hell of a lot of rules she doesn't understand.

She can't fuck him. She just... She can't, is all.

Okay. So.

She finishes. Exits, dries, forces a brush through her hair and ties it back. Stands in the middle of the room and considers for a moment, then pulls on some clothes she scarcely looks at, grabs her cuff, the knife. Before she closes the door behind her she glances back; her bloodstained jacket is still on the floor by the couch. She needs to wash it. If it even matters at this point - the blood has to have set a while ago.

Whatever. She goes.

Outside it's colder than it's yet been, wind whistling down the street and making stray bits of garbage dance. Saturday afternoon, but not many people are out. It's going to be a bad winter, people have been muttering. Worst in a while. It's not like they have much to base that on, but everyone just seems to _know._

She wanders, down the street and past the 7-Eleven and around a block dominated by more overgrown yards, broken sidewalks, bungalows. A small clot of boys tear past her, one hurling a football at the leader; the air it displaces puffs across her cheek but she only sort of notices. She's lost again - woolgathering, Mama would say, and the thought doesn't hurt quite as much as once it would have. Maybe it's that she finally feels like she isn't just doing a large-scale version of what she's doing right now - wandering in circles, aimless.

Or maybe that part of her is simply going numb. Growing the nerveless scar tissue she keeps expecting to develop, because what's been over it for months - though she's maintained it, kept from picking - is just a scab.

Not like her face.

 _We heal quick._

Past a tired-looking Publix - shopping carts clustered in its parking lot like people huddling together against the encroaching chill - mindlessly navigating the uneven pavement, her thoughts start meandering back to him. His body again - but not, she's dimly relieved to observe, for any of the reasons that motivated her earlier. She's thinking about him getting up after he asked to use her bathroom - he _asked,_ even then he asked, and now that she really considers it, she's not sure he knew what he would be to her at that point - seeing him in the thin light, his back and shoulders. The tattoo there, what looked like battling demons, but also the scars slashed across his skin, thicker and more vicious than any of the others she saw on him.

And God, there were a lot. She wonders if it's a werewolf thing, if the fighting he did in the alley is something they do all the time... or if it's something else.

Somehow she doesn't think it's a good idea to ask him.

But she'll meet others. Maybe she'll learn something by virtue of unobtrusive comparison.

She wants to know. She wants to know him. It's not even that she _wants him_ on any level. She just... He's interesting, and not just because of what he is. There might be a lot there to know.

And she's lonely. No family, no real friends, and Axel is decent enough but she doesn't really want him any closer to her than he already is. She's known it for a while, has just kind of accepted it, incorporated it into her understanding of what her life has become, but she's _feeling_ it now, because she's been with him, he's shared his cigarettes with her, showed her his home - even grudgingly, and anyway, he wasn't grudging when he took her into that other world - and talked to her and _listened_ to her like someone who doesn't want to _get_ anything from her.

She wants to know him because she likes him.

Probably she shouldn't. She watches the pavement roll by under her, the falls of her boots. She shouldn't feel any of the things she feels about him, and this is just another one to worry about.

 _Put it away._

But she doesn't want to.

At some point she becomes aware of one potential object to guide this particular stroll: she's hungry, very, and she swerves into the first place she sees - a rough-looking pizza joint where she orders a single slice with all the extra cheese she can get the girl behind the counter to pile on and a bottle of Coke which is unopened and cold and yet somehow on its way to being flat.

The girl smiles at her. The place is empty and the girl was fiddling with her braids and looking bored, and now appears to be into the fact that something is actually happening, even a taciturn other-girl with a scarred face and a distracted air. Beth pays with crumpled bills - the only kind she seems to have anymore - and presses herself into a corner in an extremely uncomfortable chair. Something with a heavy beat drifts over the tinny PA.

Nine. Nine tonight.

She has no idea what the fuck she's going to do with herself for the next few hours.

Well, she can't stay here. She lingers over the pizza for the next twenty minutes or so, until it's cold and congealed and her ass hurts more than she can possibly stand, and wolfs - _ha_ \- down the rest and plods back out onto the street.

The yards are getting bigger and even more overgrown, the bungalows thinning out, easily half of them boarded up and plastered with graffiti. One sheet of plywood over a front window advises her in a red scrawl to BUY CRACK.

Fucked Up Brain Jimmy was insisting that in her capacity as a farm girl she considered banging a pony at least once in her spare time, but she didn't, not as far as she can recall. But what the plywood is suggesting...

She'd be lying if she said she hasn't. At least once.

She didn't know how lonely she was, and that's not the only thing she didn't know. How bad things have gotten in a year, almost without her noticing. How close she is to some kind of precipice.

Or _was,_ maybe.

The opposite side of the empty street is now completely devoid of houses, all high weeds and half naked trees, and she crosses and makes her way in among them, stepping gingerly over jagged rusting metal and glittering scatters of shattered glass. She's not thinking about this either, is following some instinct she knows she doesn't fully understand, but the deeper into the trees she goes, the better she feels. The trash thins out just like the abandoned bungalows did, and the dying green and rising brown take over.

She was in a truly dying place, just now. It felt bad. She halts and stands completely still, head cocked, listening to crows shouting to each other through the treetops, watching them wheeling overhead. It felt _bad_ back there, another thing she thinks she might feel all the time and is only now really _feeling_ ; were they there too? The Ytend? Watching her from behind those boards, through the broken windows, tongues lolling over their scabby jaws and scythe-claws clicking? Looking her over, considering which parts of her would taste best fresh?

Were they crawling beside her? Have they always been?

Have they been with her since that night?

No. They haven't. Maybe she can't see them right this minute, but sooner or later she would have seen them before if they had always been with her. And she doesn't for a second imagine that Daryl would have let her anywhere _near_ his den if she had been sporting her very own demonic escort.

But they've been around. Daryl said they were everywhere.

So why is she still alive? What the fuck _happened_ that night?

What can't she remember?

She clenches her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms until her heart slows and her breathing evens out. She does feel better here. Out there along the edges it was a literal dump, but in here it's forest, real forest, even the traffic noise mostly gone, and she thinks again about that endless meadow under those countless stars, and about how Daryl had explained it as if there were more places like that. More closed rooms in the world, into which someone might enter if they could find and open the door.

How many of those has she passed through, and not known?

She starts walking again, crunching over dry leaves and dead twigs. It's not just those rooms; there's a whole other world, all around her all the time, and somehow she's passed into it, stepped behind a curtain into a completely different part of the same stage.

A veil.

All those currently popular paperbacks she's seen in bookstores, those busty women on the covers with cascades of dark hair and tight pants and tattoos, wielding swords and other fantasy weaponry. Hollywood-gorgeous werewolves and sexy vampires and fairies in bars and nightclubs. Those books always make it seem so glamorous in a pseudo-gritty kind of way. They make it pretty. Romantic. She's never really read any, but she has a general idea.

So they're right, those books. Just also completely not.

She stops again. She stops and looks down and considers her tight jeans, and a gust of wind curls around her loose hair and lifts it, tugs at her shirt, and the silver hilt of her runed knife flashes in the flat light.

Yeah, but she doesn't have any tattoos. And she's not exactly busty.

She laughs, laughs hard and it feels good, and it dances through the trees. On her way home, once again, she's almost singing.


	8. got a curse I cannot lift

**The giant werewolf language/culture/lore post is live: dynamicsymmetry dot tumblr dot com / post/129733980656/howl-a-guide**

I'll be adding to it pretty much constantly, so check back often. You know. If you care. If you share in my tremendous nerditude.

It's there partly for my own amusement, partly for the amusement of others, partly as a reference for myself, but also because this world is becoming richly detailed in my head to the point where a fair amount of info may not make it into the story proper - partially because infodumps are bad and should be avoided where possible, and I don't want to be one of those fantasy authors who become so enamored of the world they've constructed that they pack pages and pages on the minutiae of their magic system into the middle of conversations between characters that exist ostensibly for plot reasons.

So. Pretty much all of what you _need_ to know will be here in the text of the story. The guide exists to augment. But I think it might increase an appreciation of the world, so there it is if you want it.

A final note: A Hathsta pack is united by intense group bonds, and its members are not human. For them, those group bonds are maintained and strengthened in part through physical touch - especially when bonds have been threatened or damaged. In short: Pack members touching each other a lot doesn't mean they wanna or are gonna bang (they actually _can't_ bang, for reasons explained in the world guide).

So don't panic, basically.

As always, thank you so much for reading. 3

* * *

 **Chapter 8: got a curse I cannot lift**

It feels like coming here for the first time.

Which makes sense, Beth supposes. She was only here twenty-four hours ago - not even - and everything that happened was strange to the point of being hallucinatory, and even if she _did_ leave feeling more comfortable in this place, which she absolutely did not... These are very different circumstances. She doesn't feel completely at ease around Daryl, isn't sure she ever really will, but werewolves - _Hathsta_ \- who she doesn't know, more than one, and apparently not likely to be pleased with her, and she thinks that the act of walking into this with full confidence would probably require the use of certain substances.

And might be nearly suicidal levels of stupid. Nervous is probably the smart move.

So she's nervous when she gets off the bus and she's nervous when she moves cautiously along the trash-strewn edge of the meadow until she reaches the gap in the chainlink and steps through, gaze flicking up to the low loops of razorwire as she passes. She's nervous as she sets out across the broken parking lot, and she's decidedly fucking nervous when she feels the shadows beginning to close around her, the lights of the city receding, darkness swirling and stirred by her passage like a cloud.

This place isn't the menacing thing she thought it might be. If anything it might be one of the safest places in this part of the city, if some power is defending it from the Ytend and they can't venture close. And Daryl is here, and she doesn't imagine that he stays in his den. She doubts much happens anywhere nearby that he isn't aware of.

That doesn't mean this place is safe. She didn't have to pass into the presence of a goddess to know that.

Her hand is near her knife, which is once again obscured by a thick brown sweater that hangs just a little too loose on her frame - procured from the thrift shop downstairs. But she doesn't touch it, and she won't unless it truly seems necessary. She spent a few minutes standing by her door, all but ready to walk out, turning it over and over in her hands and feeling its cool and somehow comforting weight, watching the sterling gleam and trying to decide whether she should take it at all. She didn't ask about the silver, didn't mention it, but she remembers Daryl's skin sizzling under it like meat on a grill.

If they know she has it, know she brought it into their territory, that might be very bad. But no fucking _way_ was she coming unarmed.

Anyway, if she's even sort of lucky, no one will ever have to find out.

She's early - it's just after eight forty-five - and as the building looms out of the thick darkness she's wondering if she should go inside, go to his den and look for him there, but there's a soft snuffle to her left and slightly behind her, and while she freezes and tenses and whirls with her hand already pulling up the hem of her sweater-

But she already knows. So she's not surprised - and she slowly loosens - as a black wolf pads almost silently out of the night, a shadow taking shape.

If she heard him it was because he wanted her to know he was there.

"You were followin' me," she says softly - not exactly accusing. Also not asking. She knows he was. Very likely he was following her as soon as she stepped through the fence.

He makes a sound - something rough and low but far too gentle to be a growl - and walks up to her, lifting his head and looking at her with his eerily bright eyes. Nothing even vaguely human in those eyes. All wolf. Does he even _think_ like a human when he's like this? Would he fully understand anything she might say to him? Or is he as wild as he looks?

Yet another thing she doesn't imagine she should ask him.

At least not yet.

But she might do this. Could be yet another stupid thing, but he hasn't once tried to hurt her - exactly the opposite - and the worst she expects him to do now is pull away, maybe growl a little. She wanted to before and she didn't, but now she does: she bends - hardly needs to, his back is almost at the level of her waist - and lays her hand over the knob of bone at the back of his skull, the top of his neck.

It's the first time she's really touched his fur since the moment she was gripping it to claw her way up to the Ytend that was killing him. She's been thinking _soft_ , imagining it, and it is; it's very soft, very thick, very warm, and without meaning to she combs her fingers through it, pushes them deep. He stiffens and she's sure he's going to yank himself free, but instead, bit by bit, she feels him relax. He doesn't push into her hand like a dog eager for more petting and he doesn't cringe back like a dog who has never known a kind human touch and doesn't want to start now. He just _stands_ and allows her to stroke him, and as far as she can tell he isn't feeling very much about it one way or the other.

So she withdraws her hand. He let her. He let her, once this time, and for now that feels like enough.

He's not _tame_. She shouldn't for one second forget that.

But as he starts to move forward again he raises his head and uses it to nudge her hip, prodding her in the direction of the building, and she finds herself walking with him, not leading or being led but walking side by side with a wolf into the dark - a broken girl and a beautiful monster, and she has no idea why it feels as right as it does.

She still feels nervous. She still knows she isn't exactly safe, at least in some respects. But with him, like this, she also somehow knows nothing can hurt her.

Together they make their way up the loading dock ramp, and this time she's ready for it: the black void yawning beyond the doorway and the opening of the dim gray light as she steps through. She doesn't hesitate, but she does pull in a sharp little breath as all at once the night falls away from them.

The same as she remembers: cavernous space all metal and concrete and cloaked at the edges on shadow, the ghosts of old machines that made old machines. She stands and swings her gaze up and around, mouth slightly open, freshly captured by the sheer strangeness of the place. She's faintly aware of him sitting down and back on his haunches, and he releases a quiet grumble of a noise, as if he's waiting for her to figure herself the hell out and wishes she'd hurry it up.

"Sorry," she murmurs, glancing down.

He shakes himself, head all the way down to his tail, lets out a _whuff_ , and gets up and trots away from her, nosing around the edges of the room. She turns and watches him, bemused. Checking the perimeter, maybe. He said he was on guard duty, after all.

Long, low howl in the distance - mournful and deeply musical, almost a song. Daryl's head snaps up just as hers does, his ears standing straight and pricked, angled forward, every muscle tense. Another howl, shorter and closer, and maybe it's just centuries if not thousands of years of instinct, but Beth's heart is an icy drum in her throat, pounding stiff, jittery. She traps her breath behind it and takes a step back as Daryl takes one forward, and once again she feels so keenly and so _terrifyingly_ that she has no place here and there'll be some kind of consequence for her presence.

But Daryl doesn't seem nervous. He merely seems... anticipatory. To the extent that one can sense that in a wolf. He returns to her, moving more deliberately, and stands at her side, head held erect and attention fixed on the door.

Anticipatory, yes. Nervous, no. But as she half-consciously lays her hand on the strong slope of his neck, she can feel the tension lingering in him.

The impenetrable darkness that seems to fill the world beyond the doorway is pushed back in outlines, like objects emerging cleanly from tar, and out of it steps a man roughly Daryl's height and by appearance also roughly his age, brown hair, stubble long and dense enough to be an almost-beard, sharp blue eyes and a tan police officer's uniform - and an intimidatingly large gun at his hip. Beside and behind him follow four other wolves - a brown one a good bit bigger and more powerful than Daryl, another with deeper, richer brown fur and a more wiry build, a slender one with fur so glossy gray it looks silver, and finally a smaller, thinner one with fur even more solidly black than Daryl's.

As one they stop, facing her and Daryl, and the officer hooks his thumbs into his belt and says nothing. The man's eyes never leave the wolf standing in front of him, but Beth can feel him scanning her all the same, studying her, considering. Curious. She swallows and does as Daryl is: stands and waits.

Then Daryl moves.

He trots swiftly and unhesitatingly forward and immediately the other wolves crowd around him, sniffing at him, butting heads; he does the same, nuzzling, licking muzzles. It's like a group of dogs meeting for the first time in a while, Beth thinks - and at the same time it's nothing like that. That quality of _wildness_ still permeates every movement, the feeling that this is on some level completely alien to her and always will be. At best, she can probably expect these creatures to tolerate her, but that's all.

And that probably goes for Daryl as well.

The officer has turned from her to stand over this, almost as if he's supervising, but abruptly he falls into a crouch and the five wolves come to him and do the same to him - bumping their heads against his open palms, the backs of his hands, licking at them and at his face. Beth can't see him clearly from where she's standing, but she's sure that he's smiling.

This is Daryl's eal. This is Rick. She doesn't have to be told.

Finally what she gathers is a meeting ritual appears to conclude, and they all move away from each other, crouch, change. There's something businesslike in it now, she realizes as she watches them slip into and out of the huge form between wolf and human, something she wouldn't have noticed if she didn't have such a profound comparison. When Daryl changed for her it had been slow, smooth, thick with animal sensuality. This is just like...

Like changing clothes.

They straighten up, brushing themselves off. A dark-haired man just as powerful in human form as he was as a wolf, a woman with skin the same rich brown as her fur and a mane of dreadlocks falling around her shoulders, a slim older woman with short-cropped gray hair, and an young Asian man with a faintly nervous expression.

So she's not the only one feeling that. That's kind of nice.

And Daryl. Daryl, getting to his feet behind all of them, dressed as he was last night with his hair shadowing his face and one eye visible and flashing.

She stares at them. They stare back at her. The moment stretches out.

Then the powerful man spins around and faces Daryl, jabs a finger in Beth's direction. "The _fuck_ is she doin' here?"

Daryl doesn't budge, except to fold his arms over his chest. "She's got a right to be here."

"Bullshit." The pointing finger has transferred its target to Daryl, prodding him sharply below his collarbones. The others are standing back, apparently unwilling to interfere. So this, she thinks, must be Shane. "Bringin' a human into-" He barks out hard, humorless laughter. "How many other ways you gonna fuck up, _Daryl?_ Shit, this ain't even complicated. This is _basic._ "

"How 'bout you shut your damn fool mouth for five fuckin' minutes and listen?" Daryl's voice is deepening into a growl and he's starting to move forward - and so is Rick. "You don't know shit about what this is."

"I know you don't bring anyone who's not pack onto _geata_. I know humans are-"

"Shane."

Rick, quiet, but with a tone that leaves no room for argument, and it's as if a blanket has been tossed over a fire. Everything dies down, rising heat dissipating, and Daryl and Shane separate, still glaring fiercely at each other. The other three exchange glances that feel significant, though the communications within them are difficult for Beth to pin down.

Then all eyes are on her again.

As far as she's concerned, she's bearing up under this pretty well so far.

Rick cocks his head slightly. "Who are you?"

His tone is mild but she can hear a hardness under it, a ruthlessness, the same that was present when he spoke to Shane. _I'm not going to hurt you,_ it says, and the same message is clear in the cool blue of his eyes. _Not yet, anyway. But don't you dare fucking lie to me. Don't play me. I'll know._

So if she's honest, if she sticks to the truth, if she keeps her answers simple... _Rick'll listen._

If Daryl trusts him, she can trust him. At least as far as this goes.

"My name is Beth Greene."

He tilts his head a little further. "What're you doing here, Beth Greene?"

She glances past him at Daryl, who is now standing at the edge of the group, arms still folded, eyes locked on her. And he's... She doesn't know that she'd say he's trying to _reassure_ her. But the aggression that flooded him with Shane appears to mostly be gone, and a calm has settled over him that she can feel drifting into her.

She nods at Daryl. "He brought me."

"Why?"

She swallows again. This is going to be the difficult part, she's almost certain - Daryl had seemed to think so. What they would really dislike. What they would really regard as a problem. And it's not just her, any danger this might place her in. It's _him._

How bad might this be for him?

"He's..." She pauses, fumbling for the word. " _Scyld?_ He says he owes me Scyld."

She's never truly known until now what _deafening silence_ is. She stands in it, every part of her clenched, and they all stare wordlessly at her, every single one, and the combined force of those gazes roars in her ears.

Behind them all, Daryl's own gaze holds firm.

After what feels like an hour, Rick speaks again - still calm, still level, still ruthless. If anything now he sounds softer, and it isn't at all comforting. "Say that one more time?"

"He said I saved his life." She expects the words to come out in a squeak, but though there's a tremor in her voice to match the one in her muscles, for the most part she sounds steady. "He said it was Scyld. He said I... He said he belongs to me now."

"That's what I thought you said." Rick turns, looks back at Daryl, and Beth can no longer see his face. "This true?"

Daryl nods, once. He still hasn't looked away from her... and now it occurs to her that he might be just as anchored by her as she is by him.

"Rick," says the woman with the dreadlocks, almost as quiet, but once again Shane breaks in, and he's lacking the bluster from before. A kind of cold has settled over everyone, everything, and all the lingering heat in Beth has evaporated into it.

"Are you kiddin' me?"

"It's not _Heala,_ " Rick says, as if no one has said anything at all.

Shake of the head.

"Alright." Rick is just turning back to her, shooting the woman with the dreadlocks a glance, when Shane swings back to Daryl again, big fists balled.

"Jesus, and I asked how many other ways you could fuck this up."

Daryl's mouth sets into a thin line, jaw working. "I ain't-"

"A goddamn _human,_ Scyld? You'd do that?"

"Wasn't my choice."

"Like hell."

The woman is reaching for his arm, a look of intense exasperation sweeping across her strong features, but he's already pulling away and stalking back toward Daryl, looking like something ready to charge. "I said this was a fuckin' mistake and it is. I know, Carol, I know you got a weakness for strays," this to the silver-haired woman, "but _get a damn clue._ "

They're inches apart now, and Daryl lowers his own head and shifts closer, lips curling back. Suddenly Beth's limbs aren't responding. "Best not be talkin' to her like that."

"Ain't your business, _mutt_ , you're barely here at all. Now this? And you brought her here? _Bismer._ You need to be gone. Back to that _magham_ brother of-"

The punch rocks Shane back a step and he stumbles, hand flying to his mouth, spitting blood, but when he lifts his head he's baring red-smeared teeth - teeth that are lengthening in a face also starting to lengthen and darken, his entire frame beginning to swell to the accompaniment of cracking bone. As far as Beth can see, Daryl is still fully human, but he's lunging forward as Carol starts toward them, the other woman as well-

Rick is there. Rick seems to be there at Daryl's side in the time it takes to blink, seizing him by a fistful of his hair and yanking his head back so hard the crack in his neck is audible from yards away. Beth jerks herself out of the paralysis, everything in her freezing and spiderwebbing, ready to shatter. She's gotten him killed. What he did was that bad, what she _made_ him do, and he's going to be slaughtered in front of her and it's _all her fucking fault._

And then Rick closes his teeth on the side of Daryl's throat and _bites_ , and she's _sure_ it's too late but her legs are still moving, trying to move, slogging like running through water, trying to get to him, _no,_ and Shane has stepped back, face flat and human again and it's so strangely quiet as a strong hand closes on her upper arm and halts her.

"Don't. It's okay." She looks up; it's the silver-haired woman. Carol. The one who has _a weakness for strays._ Her face is tense, pinched around the edges, but there's no horror there. No fear. As if what's happening is a bit upsetting, but not really that big of a deal in the end.

Maybe Beth _is_ crazy.

"How the fuck is it _okay?_ "

Carol nods in Daryl and Rick's direction. Then Beth sees.

Daryl: still held by Rick, throat under his jaws, neck dragged into an arch that has to be painful - but he's breathing deeply. Slowly. His face was screwed up with rage; now it's smoothing out. Relaxing. His eyes are closed.

"He needed it," Carol says softly, and lets her go. "He'll thank Rick for it later. Or he should." Her mouth twists, wry. "This _is_ Daryl we're talking about here."

All Beth can do is stare. And this... She actually _knows_ what this is, or something like it. Has seen pictures somewhere at some point, footage on TV. One wolf with its jaws closed on the muzzle of another, teeth bared, looking vicious - but misleading. It's not about fighting. It's not done to hurt.

As she thinks this, as the image comes to her, Rick releases him - throat and hair - and Daryl lowers his head, ducks it like she's seen him do with her. She's expecting Rick to step away, maybe - hopefully - to direct some ire at Shane, but that's not what happens. Rick takes Daryl by the shoulders and turns him, moves fully in front of him, reaches up and gently frames Daryl's face with his hands. Leans in, tips their foreheads together. He's saying something, something far too quiet for Beth to hear.

Something meant for Daryl's ears alone.

Daryl nods. Rick pulls back, tilts his head; Daryl looks up, nods again, and somehow everything has changed. The entire room had been crackling with cold tension, but now it's dissipated, and at the center of it are Rick and Daryl, radiating calm.

No anger. No aggressive alpha wolf charging in to beat both of them down with teeth and claws and snarling. Strength, yes. Power, of course. Dominance, absolutely.

But she never would have imagined the exercise of the three of those could look so peaceful in the end.

The woman with the dreadlocks is standing her ground, scanning all of them. The young man, who's been keeping himself almost as much to the periphery of things as Daryl has, is moving in a little. There's a sense of lost cohesion being restored. Watching, she can almost _see_ broken pieces coming together again, and it's only when she lets her breath out in a long, aching exhale that she realizes she was holding it at all.

Rick withdraws, steps back and turns. Carol is already starting forward, moving to Daryl, reaching up to replace Rick's hands with hers and combing her fingers slowly through his hair. Feet away, Shane watches, calmer as well but hunched and glowering. No discipline for him, apparently. Not at the moment.

And none of the strange and strangely beautiful reconciliation she's now seeing.

"Beth?"

She starts and twitches her head upward; Rick is there at her side, his arrival just as swift and quiet and sudden as it was with Daryl. He looks down at her, still with that odd tilt, and while his face is impassive and his eyes are coolly evaluating, she can't sense any animosity in him.

He doesn't mean her harm. She's beginning to wonder if he will at all, no matter how fucked up it turns out things are on her end.

She gives him a nod and waits.

He touches her shoulder - light and fleeting, barely a graze of his fingertips - and gestures with his chin at the doorway. "Can you come talk to me?"

She glances back at Daryl. Carol is still holding onto him, head lifted to say something to the other woman and the young man. Shane has turned away and is pacing off into the shadows, hands shoved into his pockets.

Not much she can do now. She's not sure what she _would_ do. She has no place in that gathering. And at least for now, Daryl seems perfectly fine.

She returns her attention to Rick and nods again. This is what she can do. She hopes.

She follows him through the doorway and back out into the night.

* * *

"So you saved his life."

Beth jumps - a little. They've been walking across the parking lot in total silence for almost five minutes, and the silence had begun to roar in her ears again. Now his voice has cut through it, cut it off, and she's not immediately sure what to do with its absence and the words he put in its place. In her pockets her hands curl and uncurl, her nails scraping the heels of her palms.

It didn't sound like a question. Nevertheless, she gives him yet another nod, not looking up.

"I need you to tell me exactly what happened."

She finally hazards a glance at him and is relieved to see that his eyes are fixed straight ahead at the shifting dark, the faint and impossibly distant downtown lights. Though she's certain he's aware of every tiny move she makes.

She looks down at her boots, the little patch of weedy pavement directly under her. They're heading in the opposite direction of the meadow, and she's glad of that. She doesn't need that in her life tonight. "Aren't you gonna ask him?"

"You bet I am. But right now I'm askin' you." Except he's _not_ asking, and he knows it. "As much detail as you can." He pauses, sighs. He sounds tired, and to her - now intimately acquainted with the myriad ways in which one can be tired - it sounds not so much like it's about what's already happened as what's _going_ to happen. "This is something I have to understand. Alright? You can help me. Make my life a hell of a lot easier."

She doesn't dislike him, she's decided, but she's also not sure she cares so much about the ease of his life. But an easier life for him might mean one for her - maybe even one for Daryl - and she can't think of anything she has to hide.

Well. One big thing. But she can't see how that's relevant here.

So she tells him. As much as she can remember, she tells him, and when she begins there's still a great deal that's unclear, blurry - obscured behind something, only faint outlines visible. But as she talks it clarifies, fog lifting, and she _feels_ it - the terror subsumed by that narrow, mindless focus, knowing that she can kill and then doing it, knowing she can survive and doing that too, both with all the conscious attention she usually devotes to breathing.

Taking Daryl home. Dealing with his wounds to the extent that she could. Talking to him. The next day, when he told her, when he realized she could see-

She stops - stops talking and stops moving both together - and she turns to face him at the same moment he turns to her, meeting her gaze with those cool blue eyes and that cool sharp focus, somehow clear even in the dark. There's something familiar about those eyes. Something she can't quite place - and then all at once she gets it, knows where she's seen it before. Daddy and Shawn watching one of those old Westerns on TV. Something with Clint Eastwood.

 _Gunslinger,_ she thinks, and shivers and doesn't fully understand why. _Those are gunslinger's eyes._

Then he blinks and the light catches them just right and they flash at her, green-gold.

"The veil," she says slowly. "I'm not... He said I'm not supposed to see through it. See him, see any of you. Them. This."

Rick nods- then stops, brows drawn together, thoughtful. "Not like this. Some other situation, you could. But he said that's not it. So it's something else."

"What is it?"

"I dunno," Rick says. He doesn't sound particularly bothered by it, not at the moment, but he also doesn't sound exactly at ease. "I haven't heard of anything like this. Not in the last couple hundred years. Not this part of the world, anyway."

Beth nods - as if she understands, which she doesn't at all - and glances at the city lights, brushes tickling loose strands of hair away from her cheek. So many fucking questions. Each one she gets answered only leads to ten others, like a monster who grows heads faster the more you chop off.

"So what now?"

Rick sighs again and looks down, rakes a hand through his thick hair. "Now Shane gets pissed off all over again."

She snaps her eyes back to him, everything in her twisting. She doesn't know Shane, but Daryl said he would be a prick and so far, as predictions go, it's been an accurate one.

"Why?"

"'cause he's right. Daryl. About you and Scyld." Rick's gaze is level, and now he looks more than a little resigned. Seeing him like this, thinking about before, she gets the sense that he feels this way with more than ideal frequency. "You're his _agend -_ his master, basically. He's your _scyldig._ The conditions for it were met, and barring one or both of you dying, nothing can break it now. And Shane's wrong - it's real, so it's not something Daryl _chose_. All he did was put a name to what already happened."

"And I can't..." She pulls in a breath. "I can't just let him go."

Rick shakes his head and looks almost apologetic. Which Beth thinks she might appreciate at another time in another place, but not so much now. "You don't have any more choice than he does. You can ignore it, try to pretend it ain't there, but he won't be able to, so in the end you won't either. He's _bound_ to you. For life. That's all there is to it."

But she wasn't going to let him go, is the thing. He was supposed to _help_ her. That's how this is supposed to go, how it _will_ go, and that's probably a significant part of what's made the last twenty-four hours more bearable than any single twenty-four period she can recall in a while.

She shouldn't feel disappointed to hear this.

"What were the conditions?" When Rick tilts his head, eyes questioning - like with Daryl, abruptly so _canine_ that it startles her - she adds, "You said the _conditions were met._ What were they?"

Rick grunts softly, brow furrowed even deeper than before, turns without a word and starts to walk again. Nonplussed and not knowing what else to do, she follows.

"Our laws are complicated," Rick says after a moment or two. "About a lotta things, but especially about this. 'cause it's _serious._ Anything that holds until someone dies is gonna be." He shoots her a look; she can't quite read it, but there's weight in it and it presses against her like hands on her shoulders. "Normally you being human would mean this wouldn't be an issue. You wouldn't be behind the veil. For us, you wouldn't even be totally _here._ Like... walkin' side by side down the same hallway but never touching. Never looking. Never speaking. You wouldn't have anything to do with us. So our laws wouldn't have anything to do with you."

"But," she murmurs, and he lets out something like a laugh, smiles tightly. It's a closed-mouth smile, for the most part, but for a second his lips curl and she sees his teeth. Long incisors. Just a little too long to be normal.

"But. You _are_ behind it. That right there changes everything. You can see him, you can remember him, as he _is_. What you saw, how he was when he was fighting? That was his _fierd._ True form. That was who he _really is_. Not human, not wolf. Those are just masks in the end. You saw him like that, and you saw it like you see anything. As real. So that's the first thing."

 _Fierd_ , her mind echoes, and she doesn't want to, especially not _here_ where she might somehow give something away, but she can't stop it: for a wrenching few seconds she thinks about him crouching before her in that shape, leaping through the air, enormous and strong and beautiful, _beautiful,_ and she thought it the first time she saw him that way, and it hadn't just been about the way he looks. It had been deeper.

 _Who he really is._

She swallows, hard. Moving on seems to be indicated. "What else?"

"Well, like he said, you saved his life. So that's another."

"But..." It hits her, something that's been gnawing at her, and she shakes her head. "But he saved _my_ life. First. Why doesn't that-"

"Don't matter. He had to. Second he saw you in that kind of trouble, he had to. It's about honor. He couldn't just walk away from someone weaker in danger." He smiles at her, sidelong and small. "No offense."

She ignores it, pushes on. "I still don't get why that matters."

"He _had_ to. You didn't. He's stronger. You're weaker. Even if you were one of us, even if you were Hathsta, you would've been within your rights to clear outta there and let him handle it. Wouldn't have been something to _brag_ about, but you could have. You didn't. You didn't leave him. You stayed and you fought."

He stops again, suddenly, and halts her with a hand on her arm. He's barely touching her, but she can _feel_ the power lurking there, and she thinks again about his teeth on Daryl's throat. How after, though she had been at something of a distance, she hadn't seen any mark on Daryl at all. That level of control.

"So you shed blood in battle together - that's another thing. But the biggest one? You saved him when you weren't obligated, for _any_ reason. He was nothing to you. He was no one. He wasn't your friend, or your pack, or your blood. You stayed and you risked your life for him. You were willing to _give yours up_ for him. A total stranger."

He falls silent for a moment, and once more the silence begins to roar - distant, like approaching thunder. For some reason, what she can't stop thinking about is what he whispered to her when she got him on his feet.

 _Don't._

It's stupid, he was barely conscious and it was probably just babbling, but... Maybe. Like maybe he _did_ know then, some part of him. Like maybe he was trying to spare her from something.

"You risked your life for his," Rick repeats quietly. "So his belongs to you. I guess..." He releases a long breath. "I guess it actually _is_ pretty simple. When all's said and done."

It is. It's terribly simple. It's almost elegant in its deep simplicity. The balance of it. She can grasp it, can understand its shape and its logic, and maybe she was welcoming it, maybe she was and still is ready to make use of it - of _him_ \- but now she can also see the other side of it. He had no choice. Neither did she. Still don't. Never will again.

Until one of them is gone.

"Shane," she whispers, jumping semi-consciously to the next thing chewing away at her, and Rick nods.

"Shane. He'll get over it. He won't be happy, but he will."

"Why does he hate Daryl so much?"

"That..." Rick's mouth twists. "It's kind of a long story. He doesn't _hate_ Daryl, he just doesn't _like_ him. Part of it is that he's... See, Daryl is new. When we met him he was living without a cyne. A pack. That's a bad situation. We decided to take him in, but Shane was never really in favor of it. And Daryl is..." He pauses, studies her with slightly narrowed eyes. "You saw what happened back there."

It doesn't take her much thinking to understand what he means, and the chill that had lifted from her begins to seep back in. She didn't want to ask him about this. She still doesn't. It's not like she thought it was, but still. "What you did."

"You thought I was hurting him, didn't you." He continues before she can respond. "'s alright. I know that's what it looked like. The thing about Daryl is he basically grew up with no cyne. That shouldn't ever happen. So he's... _adjusting._ It's not easy for him. He needs help. It's my job to help him." He grimaces. "Shane's job too. Unfortunately."

She blinks. Stares at him. "He's... _Why?_ "

"Shane's our _alar._ Our teacher. It's what he does. Normally he's great at it, but he's a hot-head to begin with, and then there's this whole other thing that I don't wanna get into, and it's just..." Rick presses a hand to his brow, voice tensing just a bit. "It's complicated. But Daryl's alright. Shane will be. Daryl's not the only one who's gonna have to do some _adjusting._ "

"So he's stayin' with you? With the pack? The... _cyne?_ "

"Technically, if you wanted him to leave he'd have to. But I'm guessin' you don't."

She manages a small smile. "I pretty much live in one room. So."

Rick returns the smile, just as small, and that's when she's sure: she likes him. Doesn't know him - not that she knows _any_ of them - but she likes him all the same. "So he'll stay. He has a job to do here anyway." He turns back toward the building, jerks his chin in its direction. "We should get back. Make sure they haven't killed each other."

He's about to start walking, but this time it's her turn to catch him, hand on his arm. She does it without thinking, and when she realizes what she's done she almost yanks her hand back - but he barely seems to have noticed. He's simply looking at her, expectant.

"I do need him. I need him for..." She sighs, squeezes her eyes briefly shut. "I guess it's kinda my own long story. But I told him. Asked him. He said he'd help me."

"Alright." Rick rolls a shoulder. "You're his agend. Within reason, you can do whatever you want with him. Don't have to clear it with us."

"I think I should." It comes out in a rush, and it sounds tighter than she wanted, edged with something uncomfortably like desperation. A hint of it, anyway, if not the thing itself. "I think... I know you don't owe me anythin', none of you, but... I think you should know. You might be able to help me, just by... Just if you know somethin'." Her hands have slipped out of her pockets and they're gripping each other, not quite wringing. All the remaining anxiety she's trying and failing to keep in check. "If... that's okay."

Another silence stretching out, and she looks up at his half shadowed face and is increasingly sure that it's _not_ okay and she's gone ahead and fucked something up within sight of the finish line. But at last he nods at the building again. "Alright. C'mon. Tell us. We'll see what we see."

She's almost startled, even as she starts walking with him. That it was that easy. That she didn't have to make a case simply for making her case - she had no reason to be, but somehow she had been all but certain that she would have to do exactly that.

But. _Rick'll listen._

Okay.

They're halfway back when something else strikes her, something she had wondered and promptly set aside. Now that everything especially pressing is out of the way, it's asserting itself again, poking at her and insisting on being asked.

"Can I... Can I ask somethin' else?"

Rick grunts something she takes as an affirmative, and she dives in. "The other thing that would've made it so I could see behind the veil. You asked him, he said it wasn't that. What... What _wasn't_ it?"

"Oh." Rick scratches somewhat meditatively at the back of his neck. "Yeah. That. You could've seen behind it if you were - if you were _gonna_ be - his mate."

 _Oh._

Looming behind her in the dark. Reaching for her, so big and strong and so hungry. _Taking_. As he _really is._

"Oh," she breathes, almost too soft even for herself to hear, and she says nothing else the rest of the way.


	9. if you could only see the beast

**Chapter 9: if you could only see the beast you've made of me**

Daryl and Shane haven't killed each other.

They aren't anywhere near each other, in fact. In Rick's absence the group seems to have settled down to confer among themselves; Shane and the woman with the dreadlocks are seated on a wide concrete block that probably once served as a platform for long-removed heavy machinery, deep in conversation, while Carol, Daryl, and the young man are by the door, also talking. Or the man and Carol are talking and Daryl is leaning silently against the wall, head down, smoking.

Beth turns and scans him as she and Rick walk in; before everyone's attitude changes, she notes - mostly by the set of his shoulders - that he doesn't appear angry or sullen. He's just quiet. Listening.

Then he looks up - cigarette between his fingers halfway to his mouth - and so does everyone else. Once again everyone is staring at Beth, but this time it feels less oppressive, less like being pinned to the floor under very bright lights, and it occurs to her that some of it might simply be the presence of Rick beside her. _Beside_ her, instead of with the others doing the staring.

Except there's also Daryl. Daryl, who gazes at her from under the fall of his hair and lowers his head again, smoke drifting from his mouth.

"He's right," Rick says simply, nods at Daryl. "Scyld. It happened. So. Not much to do about it now. Unless I'm missin' something. Michonne?"

The woman with the dreadlocks, now standing with her muscular arms crossed over her chest, shakes her head. "Never happened before. Not that I know of. But if you say he's right about it, I don't see any reason why the rules don't still apply." Her mouth twists, and she glances at Shane. "It's fuckin' _weird._ Not saying it's _good,_ either. But as far as _Arit_ goes..." She shrugs.

"Shane? You got somethin' to say?"

Shane raises his head, elbows braced on his knees. He's still scowling, but the scowl is less stormy. He appears irritated rather than genuinely angry. But there's something lurking behind his eyes, a shadow of a shadow, that pinches low in Beth's spine. Whatever it is, she doesn't like it.

But so far she doesn't much care for Shane as a whole package. So.

"You know I don't like it." He waves a hand at the others. "They know I don't like it. _She_ knows I don't like it. The hell else _is_ there to say?"

"Might be more," Rick says quietly. "I'll talk to you later."

Shane rolls a shoulder and turns his face away, jaw working.

"Rest of you. Listen up." Rick steps a few feet away from her, remaining close but giving her space - to speak for herself, she guesses. What he's done, standing where he was, she senses it was the establishment of a position. That for now, she can be here. She has his permission. A guest, maybe, in as much as a thing like that would even exist in this situation. But she's not _with_ him.

She's not with anyone.

"We know you, Beth Greene. You don't know us. I'm Rick. Think you've met Shane." Shane snorts. Rick ignores him and proceeds to point at each of the others in turn. "That's Michonne, Carol, and Glenn." A nod, a nod, and Glenn gives her a faint smile and a little wave. "And you know Daryl."

Daryl looks up - a bit, face still mostly obscured by his hair and by the shadow it throws, cigarette held lightly between his teeth and glowing when he inhales. She can't see his eyes. But she can feel them on her.

She never would have believed, before him, that she could be simultaneously so deeply uneasy and so completely secure.

She takes a breath and disentangles her focus. She has a job to do here. And a lot might be riding on how well it gets done.

"Beth wants Daryl to stay here. Wants things to stay pretty much as they are. But she needs him to help her with somethin'. Says we might know somethin' about it too. I figure we can let her say her piece. Anyone disagree?"

No one does.

Rick turns back to her, gives her a quick upward nod. "Alright. Go ahead."

And it all disappears.

She doesn't feel them go, all those words and all those terrible combinations into which she needs to put them. They're simply gone. She stands there and she gazes blankly at all of them, throat working, and she has no idea how to say any of this, no idea how to explain what she was able to tell Daryl in a few short sentences. She was able to tell him enough. Now, for the first time in a year that feels like ten lifetimes, she's with a group of people to whom she could tell this story and _know that they'll believe her,_ and she can't.

She's not sure she has faith in the God of her father anymore, and Eostre remains one enormous and enormously worrying open question, but _Someone_ up/out there has a really hilarious sense of fucking humor.

She swallows, tries to work moisture into a mouth gone dry as old bone. _Just begin where it begins._ But she doesn't know. It feels like it began everywhere. It feels like it's beginning right now.

Panic plucking at her gut like a string, she swings her eyes over to Daryl - and of course he's looking at her, but not with the same skeptical curiosity as the rest of them. He's just _looking_ at her, tapping ash onto the concrete, and as she watches, he gives her a single minute bob of his head.

 _Go on ahead. C'mon, girl, ain't that complicated._

A little brusque. But not ungentle. This new voice is welcome to stick around. For now.

 _Begin where everything ended._

So she does. And like it was telling Rick about the fight in the alley, it starts in halting, stumbling phrases, but very soon it picks up and flows more smoothly and she tells them what she thinks they need to know - but she no longer sees them. Blood everywhere, strings of torn flesh and ragged skin. The things cavorting in it, before a fire still in its infancy. How the fire ate everything, ate the world, and the next thing she knew there was the cool grass and the back of her neck and arms blistered, the sharp odor of her own burning hair, her father's head cradled in her lap and the blinding flash of the lights of the emergency vehicles, the wail of the sirens, blurred bodies rushing toward her, and her life burning to the ground behind her.

And everything else that could die died, and she was here.

She stops and glances down. Without meaning to, she's begun fingering the cuff on her left wrist.

For a moment, nothing. They all gaze at her in that maddening silence.

Then, a cleared throat and "That's quite a story."

Not Rick. Not any of the others from whom she _might_ have been able to handle some commentary. Shane, bent over his knees again, hands clasped between them. He's not going to believe her, she can tell just by looking at him - he _doesn't_ believe her, he thinks she's crazy just like everyone else has, and none of the others will believe her and she'll be alone again.

 _Except him._

But Shane pauses, goes on. "You know what they were?" And there's no skepticism in his voice. It's not at all warm, but the hostility seems to mostly have left it.

She almost falls. Literally almost falls down. The relief drains all the strength from her, and for an awful, wonderful second she's genuinely not sure she can remain standing.

Instead she nods, gestures at Daryl. "He told me. And I've... I've seen 'em since then."

Shane's eyes widen but he goes on without addressing it. "So you know we don't know much about 'em."

"Yeah," she says, very soft. Unsure they'll even be able to hear her. "But if you could tell me what you _do_ know..."

"Alright." Shane flicks his gaze to Rick - as if seeking some kind of signal to proceed, which apparently he receives - and back to her, releasing a long breath. "They've always been around. Ain't a recent thing. But in the last couple hundred years or so - little more, maybe - there's more of 'em. More of 'em all the time. We don't know why. We don't know where they come from. We hunt 'em, kill 'em whenever we can, and it's not like we ain't tried to find out more, but every time we get close to somethin'..." He waves a hand in the air. "Poof. All gone."

Not exactly helpful. But also not unexpected. "You got any theories or anythin'?"

"One." Michonne, now, arms still crossed, dark eyes slightly narrowed. "Best one we have, though we've never found anything to prove it." She takes a breath. "About three hundred years ago there was a war. Big one. Did a lot of damage, to everything. World honestly hasn't recovered, and a lot of our best uthwita - our scholars - think it never will." She pauses, tips her head down and mutters, "Least, they did last time we heard anything from any of 'em."

Beth notes it. But not knowing what to do with it, she leaves it be. "So you think they're part of this... damage?"

Shane clasps and unclasps his hands, tension clearly lingering. "It's the only thing we got makes any sense at all. But we got no real evidence. And if the two are tied together, we still don't know _how._ " He pauses, just looking at her, and now his eyes are gauging. She can't be certain, but she thinks she sees his nostrils flare. Scenting, like Daryl did. He's trying to figure her out.

She's not sure she likes that any better than his anger.

"And if you're wantin' to know why they came after you, your family... Got no fuckin' idea."

"That's what I need to know." This time her voice is stronger, stronger than it's been, and that feels good. "That's what I need Daryl's help with. None of the rest of you have to be involved," she adds. Best to make that clear. "I'm not askin' for that. I just..." She sighs. It feels like she's emptying more than her lungs. All at once she's very tired. "Like I said. I need to know."

Rick has been watching her - closely - and now he shifts toward her the smallest bit. "Like I said, you don't have to clear it with us. You can do what you want with him."

 _What you want._

No, she can't. She should absolutely _not_ go there in her head, _no,_ not now, but... She can't.

"Okay." She hesitates, focuses on Shane again. "There's nothin' else you can tell me about 'em?"

Shane shakes his head. It's a brisk movement, almost impatient, as if he's finished with the conversation and is waiting for her to figure that out. "Nothin' Daryl can't tell you himself."

"Okay," she repeats, looks down at her boots. All her confidence is bleeding out of her. Once more she feels incredibly awkward. It's childish, she's embarrassed to even be thinking it, but she wants to go home.

Wherever _home_ is now.

"Alright. That's settled." Rick, lifting his voice - fresh authority, brisk as Shane's shake of the head, though without the impatience. "If there's nothin' else, we got us some huntin' to do." He jerks his head toward the door. "Let's get out there."

"I should take her home," Daryl says quietly. He's pushing away from the wall, dropping the butt of another cigarette onto the concrete and crushing it out with his heel. There's a kind of pressure in the way he's looking at her, still from his own shadows, and she thinks about the vibrating roar of the bike and his broad back, muscles and leather under her hands, his heat and the flash of his teeth, and her knees go liquid.

Maybe that's not such a great idea.

But she's going to have to be able to _handle_ it. Him. Or this is never going to work.

Rick tilts his head. Not canine. _Lupine._ "She can't get home on her own?"

"Ain't got no car."

"She bussed it out here?" Rick doesn't wait for an answer. "Alright. Probably best. You know we'll be in East Lake. Catch up when you can."

As if at an unspoken signal - Beth guesses that's _exactly_ what is - they're all stirring, gathering themselves, moving gradually into position for what she guesses will be a change back into wolves. Shane already - swelling, looming into the shadow, shrinking again and dropping onto all fours and trotting toward the door. Michonne too, tossing Rick a final glance - and something passes between them that seems to make the air almost hum, there and gone again before Beth can pin it down and examine it.

Carol, moving - stopping in front of Daryl, hands combing once more into his hair, and he ducks his head, butts lightly against her jaw and shoulder, and steps back as she hunches and rises, sinks down and shakes herself with her silver-gray fur rippling.

There's still Rick. As she starts to walk toward Daryl he's ahead of her, and she slows and halts as he moves in close, hand on Daryl's shoulder. But not talking as softly this time - he must not care if she overhears - and she can make out what they're saying.

"He was _tryin'_ to get my back up." Daryl says it in a low growl, jaw clenched and lips slightly curled. "He was tryin' to start shit, you saw him."

"Yeah. I did." Rick lifts his hand, cups Daryl's face, and Beth can tell that the touch is both gentle and steely, holding Daryl in place every bit as effectively as his teeth. "That's why you gotta be better. _You_ gotta hold it together. You can't depend on him to do it."

"Can't depend on him at all."

"You know that ain't true. End of the day, you're cyne. He knows that." Rick lowers his hand, grasps Daryl's shoulder again, leans in and briefly nuzzles at his cheek. At any other time, with any other people, it would be difficult to interpret the touch in any other way except one, but Beth watches it and suddenly she can't see them as human anymore. Human form, human skin, but these are two wild animals, and it's impossible to ignore.

"Be careful." Rick gives Daryl's shoulder one last squeeze and steps away, his body already beginning to rearrange itself with a rolling series of cracks.

"You too," Daryl murmurs, and turns away.

So then it's him and her and five wolves vanishing silently into the night. And then it's _just_ him and her, and he looks at her and exhales heavily and drops his gaze to his hands as if suddenly he's not sure what to do with them. All at once he's human again - human and as awkward as she's felt through all of tonight. Maybe that should be comforting.

It's not.

She pushes hair out of her face. "Could've gone worse."

"Yeah." Still not looking at her. It occurs to her - and perhaps it should have before - that he might not be pleased about the fight almost breaking out in front of her. Of her seeing it. Seeing him almost lose control like that, seeing brought back under it in that way.

How the hell would she even begin to tell him how beautiful it was? Strange, sure. Frightening. But beautiful.

She keeps coming back to that word, and it might be because it's the only one that fits.

"Sorry about Shane," he mutters, hands twitching at his sides. Unoccupied and needing to be. She's starting to sense that he might not smoke only for the enjoyment of it, or for habit.

"It's fine." She manages half a smile - possibly wasted on him, because his face is still angled down and away. "You said he was gonna be a prick."

"Yeah. Guess I did." He does look up then, meets her eyes, and she's somewhat relieved to see that his aren't wavering. He looks tired, still awkward, but mostly okay. He doesn't appear as if he's in a hurry to remove himself from her. Doesn't appear as if all he wants to do is get her home and be rid of her.

That's nice. She likes that. She's almost certain that she'd like it even if a significant part of her didn't apparently want to fuck him.

It's like she knows now. She's been lonely.

He clears his throat and looks down again. "So what're we doin'?"

Isn't he taking her home? "What, you mean... Now?"

"About _this._ " Slightly curt, but if he's irritated she doubts she's truly the cause. "About what you needed my help with. Where you wanna start?"

 _Where._ She's been thinking about _where._ She's been thinking about it for months, all through a flat dead summer, except now she understands that she was always thinking _around_ it, refusing to go where she has to go and unwilling to admit to herself what she was doing. There was only ever truly one place to start, and it's the one place in all the world she least wants to be.

Talking to the rest of them, she hadn't known where to begin - until she realized it. Finally turned and faced the truth in all its agony and all its terror.

She has to begin where everything ended.

"I need you to take me to where it happened." She draws in a breath, and it feels like it goes on forever, like her lungs have vanished and in their place is a portal to an endless vacuum.

 _Bethy, you can't run forever._

"I need you to take me to the farm."

* * *

He doesn't, not then - of course not. And she says not the next day. She has work tomorrow and the day after that, no day off until Thursday. Four days until they can go much of anywhere. But that's all right. Now that she's committed to doing this, she wants the time to think about it. Try to get ready. If such a thing is possible.

It's not even that she's so afraid of finding anything in particular. It's not that she's so afraid of anything specific happening. It's that her nightmares are one thing and this will be something else. Standing there in the waking daylight and looking at where her life ended.

Because it did. Kneeling in the grass and cradling her daddy's head in her arms - she hasn't been alive since then.

 _What about now?_

She doesn't know.

It's almost eleven - early still, by her standards and she's sure also by his, but he's supposed to be in East Lake, _hunting,_ and she can guess what for. She could ask him and confirm, but she doesn't want to talk about it. She's tired of talking. She's not sure when she last talked this much in one ninety minute period.

He takes her home. It's like before - flying through the shifting lights and hard shadows of a city night, the bike thundering beneath her and him so warm and solid against her, the air combing through her hair and tugging it free of its ponytail, whipping it around her face. She closes her eyes and leans her head back - and at some point she realizes that he's not taking her directly home. He _is,_ mostly; she knows where they are, knows the way, knows that he's taking streets that will get them back to her building. But he's not taking the shortest route.

He's taking his time. Taking more time with her. More time than he needs to.

So she holds onto him, tighter than _she_ needs to. Hugs him. She wonders if he can feel it. She wonders what he _does_ feel. What he sees when he looks at her with those green-gold mirror eyes. What he was seeing back there. What he's been seeing since this all began.

 _This all._ As if it's been more than a couple of days.

Then again, a fuck of a lot can happen in only five minutes.

Maybe he _belongs to her._ Maybe she _can_ _do what she wants with him_. But right now she's absolutely positive that he could take her anywhere, do anything, and she would go there and do it with him without a single moment's hesitation.

Maybe she doesn't want him to take her home.

But he does.

* * *

She closes the door behind her, leans against it, covers her face with her hands and squeezes her eyes shut.

There are a number of things she could do now. She could go back out, find a shitty club or a bar or something; she's still eighteen but she has a passable fake ID and it's not like anyone at any of the places she's likely to go would give a shit. She has a third of a bottle of very questionable whiskey tucked away in one of her few kitchen cabinets - because yes, after Daddy wasn't around anymore, Daddy's views on drinking no longer seemed to matter very much, and in fact drinking sometimes made everything a little more bearable when the meds didn't help her sleep and she could sneak out and get away with it. She doesn't do it a _lot,_ but. So yeah, she could lie on the couch and get slowly and gently drunk and fuck around on her phone.

Or.

 _If you were gonna be his mate._

So it happens. With humans. It does. From a single sentence, she got the impression that it's not even all that surprising. Which means it's not all that uncommon.

She curls her fingers into her hair and pulls. _God, just fucking stop._

She doesn't _want_ to.

She lowers her hands and pushes herself away from the door and moves across the room toward the bed, kicking off her boots as she goes, fumbling at the clasp on her belt and laying it - knife still strapped to it - onto the table. Shirt next, and by the time she's working one-handed at her bra she knows this isn't just a preamble to going to sleep.

 _Stop._

No.

She cuts off the light and stops before the window in the vertical bands of street-illumination, dropping her bra and standing there bare-breasted, hands dangling at her sides and her eyes half closed.

She's going to have to get this under some kind of control. She really is. Whatever it is, whatever it _was,_ whatever happened last night in that fucking meadow, whatever happened later in her bed - this bed less than two feet away from her - she needs to find a lid that fits and slam it _down_ on that motherfucker.

Cars passing outside. Kid on an undersized bike across the street, peddling in wobbly meanders. The glow from the windows of the bungalows down the block - yellowed like old wallpaper, dimming, some going out. He's out there across town - or maybe not there yet. Probably not. On that bike, thundering through the night, muscles standing out in his arms as he guides it, his own hair flying. She would, if she was more blissfully ignorant about this, think that maybe she's dropped right into the middle of another cliche and now she wants a _bad boy_ \- not even a bad boy, a bad _older man,_ because she's a fucking teenager - _God_ \- and she's guessing he's around a couple of decades beyond that.

But that's not it.

She lifts her hands - or they lift themselves - and her fingers stroke lightly across her nipples and heat pounces and shakes her, closes its teeth on the lips of her cunt and makes them throb. She sighs, tips her head back slightly, circles the little nubs with her thumbs and teases them as they harden.

It's not that he's bad. And it's not that he's older.

One hand slipping away, slipping down her body and over the bumps of her ribs - she's thinner than she was a few months ago and her bones are standing out in too-sharp relief - pressing beneath the waistband of her jeans and snaking her fingers into her panties. And she's already a fucking _mess,_ sticky into the clumped curls of her pubic hair, and she pinches at her nipple as her fingertips graze her clit.

Every part of her feels hard. Every part of her feels swollen, engorged. She bites down on her bottom lip and whimpers. Not even in the middle of her most heated and most heady and most daring fantasies - back when she had them - has she ever felt like this, like every part of her is wired directly to her cunt. Like she could touch anywhere and get herself off.

Even if she knows that's not true. No, apparently now some part of her brain has decided to get all _specific_ on her.

She laughs - laughs and noses her finger between her sopping lips and her laugh sinks into a groan. She's going to have to get a handle on it, right? Find a lid that fits?

Is it really so bad to give herself an outlet, then?

She withdraws her hand and sucks idly at her finger as she works her fly open with her other, wriggles her jeans down and hooks off her panties with her thumbs. The air is cool against the slick and sweat smeared in the creases of her thighs, and she shivers as she kicks her jeans aside. There's her bed, she could go to it, but she stands again, naked in the hard bands of light, her fingers quivering and her breath coming in shallow panting.

She doesn't think she could stop this now even if she _did_ want to.

 _Got his teeth in you._

No. But maybe he will. He won't, he won't really, but... Maybe he will.

Her mind is powerful enough to take the sheer fact of his existence, so her mind is powerful enough to put him behind her in the shadows. Waiting. Watching her, cool blue predator gaze sliding over her body. His fingers were twitching before, like they needed to _grip_ ; now he does it and the ghosts of his claws gleam. Each one of those claws long enough and sharp enough to kill her by itself.

She strokes butterfly-light fingers across her clit and moans.

Fucked Up Brain Jimmy is still hissing in the back of her mind, about - of course - how fucked up this is and how fucked up _she_ is, about how this means she's ruined and she'll never be normal again, but _fuck_ normal, she doesn't _want_ normal. She wants _him,_ the thing waiting in the dark, and she doesn't go to the bed at all; she drops to her knees on that flaking-paint floor, thighs spread to give herself better access, using two fingers to press her lips apart as her cream slicks over her knuckles.

Behind her. Closer. His heat in waves against her bare skin, and the smell of him, smoke and leather and blood and that deeper smell, _wild_ smell, and she can hear the whisper of him scenting the air for her. Of course he'd be able to smell how wet she is. He'd be able to smell how bad she wants it. Smell her _in heat_ and come for her, take what she's offering him.

Quiet slurping noise as she pushes a finger into herself, and she drops her head back and whines, palming her tit again, kneading - not much there to knead but somehow she doesn't think he would care. Not if she does this, what she's doing now, has been wanting to do since she closed that door with him on the other side of it and closed her eyes with him pressing against the inside of her mind. Not if she drops the rest of the way to the floor, spine bent downward, lifting her ass high, spread wide.

But he's not moving.

She lets out a tense, frustrated sound and thrusts her finger in deeper. It's not enough, her finger is small and slender and even two, even three... _What do you want? What's it gonna take to get you over here?_

So two, then, even if it's not enough, reaching under and hooking into herself with those inadequate fingers, wriggling in a beckoning motion against her flexing muscles. Displaying herself for him, showing him what he could have if he just comes and _takes_ it: Look how tight her pussy is but how much she could open for him, how good she could feel to him, rough wood scraping her cheekbone as she fucks her hips into a slow, rolling rhythm. Practically towering over her and unchanged now, human eyes and hands and his face obscured by his hair, but cracking and shifting, his body thrusting every part of itself outward to fill the world. She can have this. She's not hurting anyone and it feels so _good,_ and who gives a fuck if she's messed up in the head, because she was already and she doesn't see how this makes it any worse.

 _Gimme your cock._ Maybe said aloud. Breathed through clenched jaws and bared teeth, under the squelch of her fingers. She never would have done this, _never -_ that good farmer's daughter, sang in church every Sunday, she would have been absolutely horrified by this, but that girl is dead and now there's this _animal_ with her ass in the air, begging for this _thing_ to fuck her. Demanding it.

Because he belongs to her.

Bands of light drift across her closed eyelids and it's not a car, it's not the streetlamp across the way breaking off with a soft _pop;_ it's him, his massive body crouched over her, nosing at her, hot breath on her back. He's- Oh, _Christ,_ she can't even think about his _tongue,_ and she gasps and wrenches herself even higher, her hand trembling, everything trembling, _Daryl, oh my God, please, fuck me, PLEASE._

What she's smelling now isn't smoke or leather or blood, and it's not her own dripping arousal - it's sharper, musky. And there are places in her fucked up head from which she's _still_ blushing and shying away, so maybe that good farmer's daughter isn't quite dead yet, but this comes to her in a blurry outline she can barely look at, the ghost of a sensation of an idea: Him looming over her like he has both in reality and in her overheated imagination, his teeth flashing as his lips wrinkle back in a wonderful cross between a grin and a snarl, gripping her hips with hands like paws and paws like hands and hauling her back against him, hot and hard and slick with his own precome - and she can _feel_ him nudging her pussy open, her lips and he's so big, holy God, he must be so fucking _huge_ and she cries out as he's inside her with a single earth-rending thrust, so thick he must be about to split her open and so long he must be about to come out her goddamn _throat_ and fucking her with his claws digging into her hips and his teeth bared against the back of her neck, filling her over and over and taking her taking her _taking her_ and her entire body hurls itself into a convulsion as she shrieks into the dark and comes all over her pumping fingers, running down her wrist and the insides of her thighs, _gushing,_ her mouth wide as she bucks like a wild horse and her nails scrabble at the floor.

Later she'll have splinters in her knees and she'll be incapable of finding the will to care.

There's no lingering in this position while she floats back down; she collapses limply onto her side, her fingers pulling free and glistening as she lifts them and examines them in the garish orange light. Not just her fingers; her whole hand, palm and back, and as she brings it to her lips and licks - even when she wasn't what she seems to be now, she enjoyed the way she tastes, a odd combination of salty-bitter and sweet - she realizes what her body might be doing, what it would _have_ to do if...

She's a virgin. Still. Technically. Hasn't done very much of anything, actually. But she's no wide-eyed innocent at this point, and she knows the mechanics and knows that _if,_ if, if it happened and it was like _that,_ it's not going to but just say for the sake of whatever that it _did_... She would need to be wet to take him. Very. Wet and worked open.

 _If he's that big._

She moans and covers her face with her mostly clean hand.

Another few minutes and she starts to shiver, the last of the heat seeping out of her, and she pushes herself up and tosses back her bunched and tangled hair. She's still panting, thighs still slick, her skin still sheened with a thin film of sweat, but exhaustion is settling into her and with it a vague kind of disgust. Only vague, aimless and not particularly acidic, but it adds to her weariness and she sighs as she levers herself to her feet and stumbles to the bed, climbs into it and wraps the rumpled covers around herself.

Not disgust because of what she wanted back there. Not because of what he is. She's not sure where it's coming from.

Doesn't matter.

She's allowed to have this. She's allowed to have this as an outlet, as a place to put this bizarre and bizarrely fiery lust that she's incubated like sickness. But it stays in this room. Has to. Because this is already complicated enough, because she has no idea what she would be getting into aside from that additional complexity, and because...

Because she just can't. She can't is all.

That good farmer's daughter is definitely still there. On life support, but alive.

She has more immediately important things to deal with. Thursday she's going back and she's going to have to be able to hold her head together, deal with how awful she's sure it's going to be. Hold it together because of him, because she hasn't yet come apart in front of him and she doesn't want to start now.

Hold it together for _them,_ because she has to do this. Because no one else will. And it's not about them resting in peace.

It's about her.

That's the priority. That's where the fractured shards of her focus have to lie.

But she dreams. And it's not of the blood or the bodies or the fire, not of demons dancing and cackling, not of her father's head in her arms. It's not of them much later in the alley, teeth and claws and infernal hunger, advancing on her and eager for the kill. It's not even of _him,_ his power and his mirror-eyes glowing in the dark, his impossibly soft fur.

It's of the meadow and the stone circle. She's standing inside it, standing naked before Eostre's idol, wet as she was before and gasping with how bad she wants it and knowing that there's no one there who can give her release. Not even herself.

 _Pray. Child, pray to me and ask my favor._

But she doesn't know how.

Heat gathers in her and goes nowhere, and she burns. In her sleep she turns over and groans. She can feel him there in the dark - a conscious part of her knows he's not really there but it feels so real.

 _What's it gonna take to get you over here?_

For the rest of the night she's alone.


	10. it's quiet here except for this song

**Chapter 10: it's quiet here except for this song**

She drifts through the next few days like traveling through a dream.

It's not really so weird that she would, she figures. The entire thing is like that now, all the rules changing on her and the few things she still took for granted no longer reliable, and though the bulk of it has been cloaked in night and shadow, it's all seeping into the day. It's there when she's awake, when she's walking around her neighborhood, going to work, going shopping, to the laundromat, at home doing absolutely nothing at all. It's nothing dramatic, nothing that really startles or scares her; it's more a sense that everything is blurring around the edges, that the periphery of her vision is full of motion that vanishes when she turns her head to see it better. Figures very briefly in the reflections of storefront windows and glass doors that don't look exactly like her. Once or twice she catches a glimpse of something hurtling through the sky that isn't a bird or a plane and sure as hell isn't a man in underwear and a cape.

The light is different; it seems dimmer and the shadows all look longer than they did, regardless of the time of day. The shadows themselves are deeper, and more than once she could swear she catches something moving in them, crouched, slipping away again before she can get close. People are different; she'll be walking down the street and barely glance at someone as she passes them, but seconds later she'll be _sure_ that there was something off about them - eyes or fine details of the face or just the way they were holding themselves - but when she turns she won't be able to see anything.

Sometimes no one will be there at all.

Even if the light is dimmer, colors seem brighter and more intense. They bleed off the edges of things and into the air, and now and then they shimmer when touched by direct sunlight. Bluer blues, greener greens, red like bloody assaults on the eyes. Smells, sharper and richer, forcing themselves into her nostrils. On Monday night a middle-aged biker comes in to pick up a box of condoms - Durex XXL, who the fuck is he kidding - scratching at his bald spot and leering at her, and his reek of old french fries and sour sweat and stale piss is so strong that after he leaves she doubles over behind the register and retches.

On Tuesday she goes to pick up some groceries and she has to stop in the cereal aisle and close her eyes until her head stops throbbing.

The moon is brighter. Wednesday night going home, the waxing gibbous moon is impossibly, insanely bright. She can hardly look directly at it. It obscures the streetlights and casts shadows as hard as August afternoon sun, soaks everything in light the color of freshly scrubbed bone.

Is this what it's like for him? All the time?

She wasn't made to be able to see all of this. Or so she's been given to understand. But she is. It's only occasionally very noticeable, but it's getting worse every minute.

Something happened that night in the alley, with him. Something changed. She stepped through a doorway - some much more subtle version of Eostre's meadow - and she has no idea how to find her way back. She has no idea if she wants to. No idea if it would be possible even if she did.

Could the veil ever cover her eyes again?

She lies in bed in the deepest parts of the night and she thinks about him. He has no phone, but she could get on that damn bus - or catch a late-night cab if the bus is no longer running - and go to him. What she would do, she has no idea. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe all she wants to do is sit with him, sit in his den and smoke with him in silence, wander the broken wastelands with him walking as a wolf at her side.

Get on the back of his bike and hold onto him, let him roar her through the night.

Here's the truth, and by Wednesday night she can no longer ignore it: When she's with him, even in her mind, she doesn't feel dead anymore.

She rolls over and slides her hand between her legs, teases herself, but it's not like it was. It's not this desperate, almost violent thing. He's there in the dark, and sometimes there are teeth and claws, and shoulders rippling with muscle and silky with fur, but just as often he's a man, hard body pressing her down and rough hands on her - sometimes not so rough. Gliding over the curve of her spine, over the swell of her ass, nudging her fingers aside and replacing them with his own. Thick and calloused and pushing into her and giving her _almost_ exactly what she wants; she bites the pillow as she comes in a slow, hot wave - and even like this, she feels his teeth closing on the back of her neck.

She wonders if this was always in her - or if this, too, is what happens when you walk through whatever door she stumbled into. Whether - perhaps - if it hadn't been him, this need in her would simply have latched onto someone else.

But it is him. Him. _Hers._

And despite her best efforts, she still has no idea what to do about that.

* * *

She told him to be outside at noon and he's outside exactly at noon, bike idling, sunglasses and a leather jacket and a cigarette smoked two-thirds down to the filter flicked onto the pavement as she comes out the door. Speaking of cliches, he basically looks like one, and she almost smiles.

She also hasn't seen him in the daylight before. In her apartment the morning after the alley, sure, but that had still been largely in shadow, still _inside_ , and she hadn't watched him leave. Now he's there on the bike in full sun, and maybe it's just that the context is still so new to her but he doesn't look as if he really belongs there. Doesn't look entirely at ease.

If she had to guess she would say he probably sleeps through much of the day. But with him, now, she wouldn't want to assume anything.

The crossbow is strapped to the back of the bike.

"Hi." She actually _is_ smiling just a touch as she comes across the sidewalk to him. She, as far as she's aware, does not resemble any kind of cliche, paperback cover or otherwise; she might have a knife tucked under her own jacket - new, sans bloodstains, not leather at all - and she might be wearing boots and tight jeans, but the boots are her same old ones all worn and faded and the jeans are in much the same condition, holes just about to wear through the ass and knees. It wouldn't be hard to replace them and she has money and there's what she could get downstairs, but.

It's been so hard to care about anything like that.

He gives her a tiny up-nod, and even behind the nearly opaque lenses she can tell he's looking her over - no particular heat in it as far as she can tell. He hasn't looked at her like that ever since she met him, not that she can recall, and now it occurs to her to wonder if he's capable of seeing her that way at all. If he would ever be interested in _anything_ like that with her, all circumstances being different and ideally arranged for such.

She might just be this little girl with a scarred face and an inclination to be mildly annoying at times. Wouldn't be surprising, in fact. She's not sure why she didn't figure that before, unwise assumptions or no. He's got years upon years on her and what she is to him...

Well. Doesn't matter anyway.

"Ready?"

He tilts his head at her, and from the set of his mouth she detects both very slight amusement and very slight irritation. "Yeah, you fuckin' tell me. You're the one wanted to do this."

"Alright." She sighs; she's not bothered by it. If he _does_ find her irritating, there's not a whole lot she can do about it. Not a whole lot she cares to do. How he feels does matter to her - more than she might have expected with someone she met barely a week ago - but he's also a fucking adult, of whatever species, and he can deal.

Deal with one little girl with a scarred face and an inclination to be mildly annoying.

Anyway, right now she has a fuck of a lot on her mind.

She moves to the bike and swings a leg over, settling herself behind him, pressing forward - not more than she has to as a matter of course, but of course that doesn't make a whole lot of difference, and she has to battle back a fine shiver as it tries to creep down her spinal cord. His leather is so warm - sun and body heat both, she guesses, and as he pulls away from the curb she gives in to impulse and lays her cheek against it, the thud of his heart in one ear louder than the engine's growl.

If he feels her do it, he gives no sign.

The bike leaps forward and the wind grabs her hair and plays with it like it loves to do, and her block blurs away and the other blocks after it as he arcs them down to I85 heading southwest.

It's been a long time since she touched this road, this direction. She sees the sign, the interstate and the exits and the points beyond, feels the swerve as he pulls into the merge lane, and her stomach swerves with it. Blocks of green overhead blur like the block she lives on and she leans her head against his back again and closes her eyes.

She told herself that she appreciated the time between the weekend and today, temporal space in which to prepare herself for this - or try to - but the truth is that she thought about it as little as possible. It wasn't something she consciously intended or made an effort to avoid. She's become very good at not going into certain parts of her fucked up mind - somewhat ironic then that now she can't seem to stay out of the part of it which her hot and pounding fantasy version of him has come to occupy - and she does it now by default. She was going to the farm; all right, good, and in the meantime there were so many other things clamoring for her attention, such as restocking the fridges and the racks of jerky and doing laundry and playing level upon level of Candy Crush, and watching the face of the world slowly peel back to reveal something much stranger beneath.

She's going to the farm and she's not ready, and she has no idea how she was supposed to be.

So it probably didn't matter how much she thought about it anyway.

After, when Aunt Martha and Uncle Jake came down to take care of things while she was in the hospital - and then getting out of the hospital and then back _in_ the hospital, a couple of times - they rented a house in town so Beth could finish out the school year. _Consistency,_ they said and the doctors agreed, even though if anyone had thought to ask what Beth wanted, _getting the fuck out_ would have been her preferred option, but regardless, what it means is that when she ran, when she hopped the Greyhound heading northeast, she was _running from_ roughly the place Daryl is now taking her back to.

Middle of the night, backpack and the clothes on her back, about a thousand dollars she managed to save and a couple hundred more she stole from Uncle Jake's top dresser drawer because why the fuck not - and _Uncle Jake_ had a magazine in there stuffed under his folded briefs featuring full page spreads of girls who didn't look a whole lot older than Beth doing a variety of things with a variety of objects and people, so _that_ wasn't creepy at all - clutching all of herself with invisible hands in the sickly lights of the bus station, keeping as much distance as possible between herself and a kid who looked to be in his mid-twenties and who was so drunk he could barely stand up. Clutching all of herself and huddling in the worn and deeply uncomfortable seat, rough fabric like sandpaper against her bare legs because for some unknowable reason she wore shorts that night, leaning her head against the window and trying to sleep and failing and watching the lights of I85 blurring past. Red brake lights and yellow-orange rest stop lights and stretches of hard white high-powered streetlights, the lights of tolling stations, the lights of towns and houses and lives that hadn't ended and somehow still held together.

She traveled this road coming to Atlanta, running because running was the only thing that made sense anymore, because if she was crazy she might as well go ahead and do something crazy, and because she had to _get the fuck out_ even if night after night she goes back in her dreams.

She couldn't stay there.

 _I don't want to be gutted._

If she had stayed, one way or another she would have been.

She ran in the night. Now Daryl is carrying her back there in the middle of the day - a bright, crisp, mid-autumnal day - and the road should look completely different but as the bike roars over it, it's like the sun goes out bit by bit and only those night-road lights remain.

And him. He's with her. His light. His glowing eyes, those mirrors, catching the light and sending it back. Eyes in the in the dark, and not to fuck her.

Just there.

 _Long as I'm breathin', I'll be by your side._

She's sleeping, somehow she knows that. She's sleeping - or at least drowsing heavily - but maintaining enough muscle tension to hold onto him, lulled by the bass drum of his heart.

And even if she couldn't hold on, he wouldn't let her fall.

He's taking her back. There's no way she can be ready. But she's glad she's not going alone.

She's glad he's with her.

* * *

From where she lives now to where she lived then is about two hours. As far as she can tell she's semi-conscious for a little over one of them; there's a stretch in between where everything fades out into that dream-night she can't ever seem to truly escape. But she's awake before he takes the exit, and she's more and more awake as he turns onto a long two-lane country road lined by trees burning the last of their autumn fire, now and then glimpses of fields beyond.

She knows this. All of this. This road, these trees, those fields. That fire.

God, she doesn't want to think about fire.

She's clutching herself again. All her broken pieces threatening to fly apart in the face of rising g-force. She's clutching herself so she clutches _him,_ holds him tight, and she thinks she might feel him tense up just for a half second.

Maybe. Could be her imagination. Because then he's back to normal. For whatever given value of _normal_ applies where he's concerned.

It's not much further. The trees are falling away, throwing long shadows over fields going brown and gold. And now she sees that the absence of the veil doesn't just apply to Atlanta. It's out here too. It's in all the lines, the shapes, the colors - the way the trees reach for the sky with branches like extended fingers, the way they're just a little too tall and a little too thin. The shadows beneath them, moving shapes she can almost make out. The fiery leaves so fiery they looks as if they should be sending plumes of smoke into the air.

The road. It's paved all smooth black-gray, but somehow it seems to almost be _shining. Glowing._

A shadow passing overhead; she jerks her gaze upward just in time to see it - another one of those flying things that aren't birds and aren't planes, and this is the best look at it she's yet had. It's lower than usual, and the afternoon sun strikes its flank and makes it shine brighter than the road. Makes it gleam.

It has wings. It has wings and a long neck, a long snake of a tail, and she knows what it _looks_ like. She knows that. Every kid raised on fairy tales does.

It can't be, though.

 _Honey, you're on the back of a werewolf's motorcycle. I think a lot of things_ can be _now._

Thanks for that, Mama.

But it's so hard to keep her attention on any one thing. Everything keeps grabbing her, tugging her away from itself. She squeezes her eyes shut and feels the wind, the chill rising in it in spite of the sun, and soaks it in. Cold to bank down the coals.

It was right around this time. It was late October when it happened. Not quite Halloween. After the fact she had allowed herself to notice the irony - if irony is even what it was. Halloween and monsters and coming to the door for treats.

She opens her eyes and there are the familiar rolling hills, there's the distant spindly tower of the windmill, the fences, the long drive.

The place where the house used to be.

She nudges his shoulder and points. A minute or so later he's turning up that drive, wheels raising little clouds of dust, and her heart is ramming itself into her throat like a fist trying to punch its way out of her. Her hands have nearly gone numb, fingers tingling. Her knees feel like bags of water.

He pulls to a halt a few yards from where the porch steps were, not far from the collection of large and ancient trees under whose shade she played, sat and strummed her guitar, dozed through early summer afternoons when Daddy spared her from chores during the hottest parts of the day.

Farmhand came through for one fall harvest, used to eat lunch there. At sixteen - almost seventeen - she developed a gentle schoolgirl crush on him, even though he had at least fifteen years on her. He was rough but not unkind. Tolerated her and maybe even liked her, but never - as far as she could tell - saw her as more than a kid.

And then he was gone. And then a year later everything was gone.

Paddock a ways away to the right, where she gave the horses exercise. Where she learned to ride.

A further ways to the left but clearly visible down another dirt drive, the old barn.

Or where it was.

Ahead of her are the foundations of the house, the rest of the blackened carcass long since cleared away, but she barely notices. She swings herself off the bike as if in a dream, stumbles as she starts to walk toward the open patch of ground where the barn used to be. There's nothing left of it except its outline. The pig pen to the side. The chicken coup - not directly connected to the barn but gone as well. Nothing. Not even boards. It didn't burn that night so since then it's been leveled, cleared away. An old outbuilding in poor repair, demolished and removed from the land.

 _Her land._

Aunt Martha and her creepy fucking husband took it in trust for her. Then she ran.

She has a horrible feeling about what they might be intending to do with it.

She's still stumbling along, boots scuffing and hands hanging limp at her sides. That barn. The deep, pungent and not unpleasant smell of animal dung. Sweet hay. Nicker of horses in the stable. Lowing of their three cows. Light streaming through the slats, motes dancing in its beams. Everything in there had always been soft and warm and safe. As a child, playing in the hayloft, hide-and-seek with a big brother who she believed was indulgent and later came to understand was doting. Darting in and out of stalls. Laughter ringing off the rafters.

She loved that barn and they've taken it away from her.

Somehow it's too much. Somehow it's that. It's not the house. It's not the blackened foundations and the glaring fact of its absence. It's not the grassy yard out nearer the road where she was found or the wider part of the front drive where all the emergency vehicles parked. It's not any of those things. It's this, some kind of final insult on the part of people she never believed really cared about her all that much, taking from her one of the few things she had left even if she hadn't made any plans to ever return to it, and she goes down on her knees in the dirt and hugs herself, stares at that hole in the world until it blurs away and the breeze cools the tears burning tracks down her cheeks.

It's not just the barn. It's not just the absent house or the trees. It's everything. That veil had lifted; another one is descending now and the world feels so distant, so unreal. So unimportant. Her life died; someone is busy dismantling its corpse.

It was a mistake to come back here.

The grumble of the bike has stopped; maybe it stopped a while ago. The world is silent except for the whisper of the wind in the grass and the harsh calls of crows in the trees. Even her weeping is soundless. But she feels him behind her, all at once - like she's felt him in the dark, in her mind. Big, powerful, looming. He's a man, though. He's just a man in a cliche of a leather jacket and sunglasses, brown-black hair falling around his face. Standing wordlessly over her and staring at her with those narrow wolf eyes.

She had been glad he was with her. Now she wishes he would get the fuck away from her.

He doesn't. He just stands there. And she's beginning to emerge the smallest bit, enough to want to turn and _tell him_ to get the fuck away from her, and she's about to do that - maybe snarl it at him - when she hears the now-familiar rolling series of cracks as his body remakes itself. There on her knees, listening to it happen, she feels no desire whatsoever. None of that frighteningly intense lust. She's just... She's frightened. Not much but it's there, and she doesn't know why.

 _Who he really is._

She's tensing, tensing, and when she feels an enormous paw-like hand close over her shoulder, looks down and sees the points of those viciously lethal claws lying delicately against her, she shudders violently, can't help it, and when his other hand closes over her other shoulder and he tugs her backward she moans. It's still not desire - all she wants to do is tear herself away from him and run, but then she's enfolded by him, his warmth and his unbelievable softness, his massive arms curling around her and pulling her against his broad chest.

She's aware that there's tension in him too, and there's an awkwardness in it, as if he's touching her but he really doesn't want to be because he's not sure how and is afraid he'll get it wrong, holding her but not tightly as if he's afraid he might break her. But suddenly she doesn't care, because he's _there,_ so much more real than any of her most visceral fantasies of him, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with wanting to fuck him as she turns in his arms and curls into his lap, makes herself even smaller than she already feels, buries her face and her hands in his thick fur and sobs.

And he holds her a little tighter.

He's saying something, she realizes after a few minutes of this. Very softly, almost inaudible. Not English. She doesn't understand. She didn't know he could speak like this at all.

 _Efensorge._ Or it sounds like that. Something like that. _Efensorge. Bemurnan._

She doesn't need to know what it means. She lets go, releases, lets herself soak his fur with her tears and lets him hold her in his strange, uncomfortable way. And it fucking _sucks_ and he's not going to make it better because he can't, he can't undo any of what happened - he might have powers of some kind and might know magic but he doesn't know any magic that can fix what's so horribly broken here.

In her.

Maybe it was a mistake, coming back. She has no idea what she expected but there can't be anything here for her except more death.

But she's glad he's with her.


	11. how soft your fields so green

Okay, SO.

To answer a question multiple people had from the last chapter: Why did Daryl shift into fierd form to comfort Beth?

It's a Hathsta's "true" form, the most intimate form they take (also the traditional form for battle) so him doing that - instead of taking the form of a wolf or keeping his human shape - is significant. And I'll be honest with you: I had the idea of it and the image was very vivid and felt right so I wrote it that way, but I'm not totally _sure_ why he did that. But I do have some guesses.

My primary one has to do with how physical the Hathsta are with each other, in order to maintain and strengthen (and repair) group/pack bonds. Even as humans there's a lot of touching, stroking, even nuzzling (and again, isn't at all and in fact cannot be sexual in any way). This Daryl is reasonably comfortable being physical that way with his own pack - at least with Carol and Rick - but Beth is another matter; he might be bound to her but she's still human and he barely knows her.

But she's grieving. And something else the importance of group bonds means is that Hathsta don't just observe intense emotion and feel some sympathy; they feel _profound_ empathy. Which is one reason why the ritual phrase said during sorrowful times means "I mourn with you."

Daryl feels very awkward being physical with her at all. But he still feels the bond, he's feeling it more strongly as time passes, and he felt her grief and sorrow in a way a human wouldn't. And was moved to take off his mask. Perhaps also because if he doesn't feel comfortable doing it regardless, he might as well go all-in.

So. I think that's probably why.

Anyway, shortish chapter this time. More in the next day or two. 3

* * *

 **Chapter 11: how soft your fields so green**

She doesn't remember pulling away. She does, must have, because the world snaps into focus and there she is still on her knees but with him a couple of feet from her, and he's human again, sitting crosslegged in the dirt and watching her with an unreadable expression on his half-shadowed face.

She looks at him and then down at her hands and she wonders if she imagined the whole thing. His chest, his fur, how he gathered her in. How he was tense and awkward and it felt as if he was fighting some core element of his nature in order to do it - and obeying some other core element, maybe.

Maybe she only imagined how good it would feel to cry in a monster's arms.

She has no idea how much time has passed; going by what little she remembers of how the shadows were when she went down, it can't have been more than half an hour. So it's probably around three.

Two hours one way for nothing but tears.

"Sorry," she whispers, and swipes at her snotty nose with her sleeve. Her eyes feel swollen, her cheeks hot. The scar on her left one is throbbing gently like the memory of pain. Before, she didn't want him to see her like this, because _no one_ has seen her like this since the yard and the grass, and then later in the hospital, two burly nurses holding her down and strapping her into the restraints and then holding her down some more until she gave up and wept, and then with one of them - calmer, quieter, and kinder to her in the end - it was just holding.

And then of course the sedatives, and when she came back a couple of days later everything was over, and she doesn't even remember most of the funeral.

She didn't want him to see her like this because she didn't want anyone to, because no one has the _right_ to, but while he doesn't either, it's more that...

She's not sure what it is.

 _Sorry._

She fell apart against him. Was a mess. She can see a wet spot on his shirt.

He shakes his head, gives her something vaguely like a shrug. "'s alright."

 _No, it's not._ But she's not interested in arguing. She scrubs at her eyes and looks back toward the place where the barn isn't, and she figures the least she can do is offer him some kind of explanation.

"The house burned down," she murmurs. "So that's gone. But there was a barn over there. It didn't burn. Now _it's_ gone, and I didn't say they could, and I..." She falls silent as her gut twists, ties itself into a vicious little knot, and for a few seconds she can't draw a breath.

"Who's the land belong to?"

She sighs. "Me. I guess. I'm eighteen, I... I dunno. I have this aunt, this uncle... They're not, not really, they're just some of Mama's cousins, but they're the closest family I got left so they came and they... They took it all over. _Guardians,_ y'know. So." She rolls a shoulder. "So."

"So," he echoes softly, and says nothing else for a moment or two. He's looking past her at the roughly rectangular stretch of dry, open ground - studying it. His sunglasses are off - of course - and his brow is very slightly furrowed, and there's a keen quality to his gaze that catches her attention. "Why you think they tore it down?"

"This is a lotta land. But they're not gonna farm it themselves and probably no one else would buy it to do that. Not the way we did. And I'm... Well." _Just me._ "But there's a lotta developments goin' up around here now. Town's actually growin'. _Exurbs_ and everythin'. So," she says again. "There's that."

"If it's yours, they can't sell it without your say-so."

"It's technically mine. I'm not even sure it is, not exactly." She closes her eyes for a few seconds, pinches the bridge of her nose. The throbbing in her scars has spread and pushed into her sinuses, and the sunlight is like a hand pressing down on her head.

Perhaps he'll let her borrow his sunglasses.

"And I ran. I ran away from them. They can probably do... Y'know. They can probably do some legal stuff or somethin'. Maybe."

"Maybe."

He sounds distracted. He _looks_ distracted. She watches him and she sees his nostrils flare - scenting the air - and once again the human form he's pulled over himself seems thin, almost translucent, and she sees the hunched dark shape compressed beneath it. Inside him.

Waiting.

Slowly he gets to his feet and reaches down a hand. After a second or two she takes it and allows him to tug her up - lightly, as if her weight is negligible. Probably to him it is.

She pulls herself further into her jacket, feeling a bit like a turtle; the air is suddenly chillier in spite of the sun and the breeze is picking up, shaking leaves out of the trees a few yards away. She looks back at the parked bike, thinks about the road and how it might be better to get back on it again, get out of here, and she's about to suggest that they do just that when he walks silently past her and toward the empty patch of ground.

She stares at his back. Then, bemused, she follows him.

He's walking slowly, deliberately, and after a moment of observation she realizes what it's like: as if he can't see and is feeling the steps with careful placements of his toes, searching for obstacles or uneven ground. But his eyes are open and focused as ever, and when she glances down at his right hand it's pushing back his own jacket, fully revealing a sizable knife at his hip.

Runes etched into the handle. Like the ones in her blade. She recognizes them immediately, pulls in a soft gasp, but before she can fumble enough of herself together to ask him about it, he's speaking again.

"Just a barn here?"

"Yeah. I mean..." She points. "Over there was the pen for the pigs. That was the stable. There was a chicken coup a little way that way. Why?"

"'cause ain't just a barn here. Least I don't think so."

"Well, there's _nothin'_ here anymore."

"Shh." The sound is soft but sharp and it startles her just a touch, his hand upraised to her and his head cocked. Listening.

She listens too. He's not crazy. He's not crazy, at least not as far as she can tell, and he _knows_ this world, or at least the parts of this world into which she seems to be sliding with increasing rapidity. If he hears something - or if he's listening for something - something might very well be here.

But there's just the breeze, the leaves, the low drone of a car on the road.

"You hear that?" He takes another few cautious steps forward, head still cocked and hand still raised. Interpreting it now as a command to stay put, she doesn't move after him.

"No?"

He grunts. "Might be pitched too high. You're human."

She crosses her arms, scanning the ground - and then, for the hell of it, the sky. "You mean like a dog whistle?"

As soon as she says it she wonders if he might be insulted, but he only glances back, a faintly sardonic twist to his mouth, and nods once. "Yeah. Like a dog whistle."

"So what _is_ it?"

"I dunno." He's now feet from where the barn door was, and there he halts and stands, arms held slightly out from his sides. "It's somethin'." He glances back again. "You never felt nothin' here? Saw nothin'?"

Aside from some of the best days of her childhood? Somehow she doubts that's what he means. Deciding to risk it, she moves closer; this is weird and dimly troubling but at least she's not thinking about how angry she is anymore. How sad. At least she's not hurting - or she _is,_ but it matters less. A distraction is a distraction.

Anyway, he doesn't tell her to stop.

"Nothin'. I mean... It was a barn. I played in it a lot. When I was little." She nearly smiles, and there's a harder twinge beneath her breastbone. "When I wasn't so little."

He grunts again but says nothing else, and she's almost reached him when suddenly he drops to one knee, swiftly drawing the knife at the same time. She stops dead and stares, bewildered, as he uses the point of the blade to scratch a complicated series of figures in the dust. Then he pauses and appears to wait.

Nothing happens.

He bites his lip and looks up, frowning. Around, at everything. At her. If he was a wolf, if he was in _fierd,_ she's sure every inch of fur on his body would be standing on end. She still can't feel or hear or see anything - which is getting more and more annoying all the time, because if it's doing _this_ to him, shouldn't she? Sense something? _Anything?_

All at once he exhales, hard, and reaches out a hand. "Gimme your knife."

She blinks. "What?"

"Your fuckin' _knife_." He makes an impatient beckoning motion with his fingers. "Give it here."

Nonplussed, she pulls up the hem of her jacket and draws it from its sheath... And stops, about to extend it to him, as the sun gleams off the silver blade. The handle.

What it did to his neck.

"I don't wanna hurt you," she whispers - and something in his eyes softens. He's already reaching under his own jacket, behind, and he produces a long red bandanna, wrapping it around his hand and holding it out again.

"See? I'll be fine."

If he's not worried, she supposes she won't be either. She turns the knife in her hand and holds it out by the blade, and he takes it, and - gripping it a bit gingerly - lowers it to the marks he scratched in the dust with his own and repeats the motions.

Somehow it's different. Maybe it shouldn't be, not this much, but it is. His blade lying beside him in the dust, dull and tarnished in comparison to hers. Hers is small, elegant, wickedly sharp, and it swoops through the figures as he makes them, long curves and quick slashes, winking and glittering as it moves. He makes the knife dance as he works it around a semi-circle, and she's lifting an entranced hand to her mouth when he stops and gazes down at what he's done, motionless.

He's breathing hard, as if he's been running. A drop of sweat is trickling down his cheek from his temple. She looks at him, at the scratches in the dirt, and she knows what she just saw.

 _Magic._

But nothing happens.

"What-" she starts, and then the world around him falls away like a torn curtain.

She gapes at it. If she had to describe it to someone she would have no idea how to go about it. It's like a _tear_ in the air itself, shimmering, except it's like a hole, like a portal, like a wormhole on one of those iterations of _Star Trek,_ except no, it's like a door opening, like a window, like a mouth wide to swallow him, and what's on the other side is all shifting shadow, clawing for the light and sucking it in.

And it's _singing,_ a high pitched warble that reminds her of the one or two times she's heard a musical saw.

She stumbles forward, a warning caught in her throat, but he's getting to his feet and turning to her, still holding the knife- And he's smiling when she reaches him.

Not a lot. Hardly at all. But it's there.

Behind him and through that tear - she now sees - is the open ground and the trees and the familiar rolling hills in the distance.

Under that endless sky of countless stars.

"Ain't just a barn here," he repeats quietly, and holds her knife out to her. "Girl, you been playin' on top of a Night Gate all this time and you never even knew."


	12. I'm gonna show you where it's dark

**Chapter 12: I'm gonna show you where it's dark but have no fear**

"A _what?"_

"Night Gate," Daryl repeats patiently, and jerks his head at it and at the night very clearly visible beyond. "See?"

Yes, she does see. She also doesn't see at _all._ When he took her to Eostre's meadow, the process of entry had felt gradual, a transition from the world she knew to somewhere other. She hadn't been able to pinpoint the exact moment of crossing. She simply looked around and realized she wasn't in Atlanta anymore.

Had a dog with her, too. She doubts he would have taken well to being called Toto.

What's beyond the tear in the world - the _Gate_ \- looks a lot like that starlit meadow, except for how it's a perfect copy of the goddamn farm... but it's also nothing like it whatsoever. If there's an explanation for this, it's not apparent to her. And Daryl seems to know exactly what's going on, to be _comfortable_ with it, and that's deeply irritating. She fights back an unwelcome scowl.

"I _heard_ you, Jesus. What _is_ it?"

He's quiet for a brief moment, appearing unfazed by her terseness. Then he jerks his head at the tear again. He looks as if he's decided something.

"Lemme show you."

She clenches her jaw, her irritation intensifying. She could, she supposes, _command_ him to give her a straight fucking answer, because the last time she followed him into some kind of bizarre parallel universe she ended up almost insane with a horrible directionless lust - that she isn't sure hasn't had some lingering effects.

But he also kept her safe. She felt safe. She _was_ safe. Every time she's been with him she's ultimately been safe. And the part of her untouched by her temper is informing her that it's vanishingly unlikely that he would lure her into _peril and doom_ at this point.

He's extremely unconcerned. He's _amused._ She's probably fine.

She sighs and steps forward. She doesn't sheath her knife. "Do I have to hold my breath or anythin'?"

He shrugs. "Can if you want."

"Fine," she mutters. And he's turning, already moving through the gate, when - half impulse and half instinct - she gropes for his hand and captures it, threads her fingers with his. She feels him tense, abrupt and sharp.

Then he squeezes.

There's the sensation of pushing through a very thin layer of what she can only think of as _gelatin_ \- a membrane - and she's standing on the other side in a world cloaked in night and lit only by stars, though the stars are bright enough to cast shadows. He's already tugged his hand free from hers but she barely notices; she whirls and catches a last glimpse of the sunlit dust and grass and swaying branches before the tear in space folds itself closed and vanishes literally into thin air, leaving no trace at all.

She gapes at it, her mouth slightly open, then whirls on _him._ "Can we get _back_ that way?"

"Opens from that side, it'll open from this one. Easier, probably." He points over her shoulder, looking past her, and as he does the mirrors in the backs of his eyes flash. "There's your barn."

Slower, she turns. And there it is.

Once more she's relegated to staring. She can't move, breath knotted around her ribs. It _is_ the barn, the barn as she always knew it, a dark hulk in a lighter darkness with starlight silvering its outlines. Those rough boards, weathered and pale gray, the hayloft overhead. The low stable too, off further to the left, and toward the back is the pig pen. The chicken coop. It's all there. Like nothing ever happened to it.

The door is standing ajar and she drifts toward it on numb feet, knife still held in one unconscious hand. She lays her other hand against it when she reaches it, runs it down and feels the grain, tiny splinters catching on the pads of her fingers. When she was fourteen she got a monster of one in the heel of her palm. Hurt bad enough that she cried, was embarrassed about it, didn't want Shawn to see her, but he did and pulled it out for her, careful hands while all the time he was calling her an idiot, _it's nothin', quit whinin'._

She closes her teeth on her lip and leans against the door. She's not going to go to pieces in front of him again. Once was more than enough.

Quietly behind her: "Y'alright?"

She nods, sniffs hard, raises her head and peers inside. The interior is too dark to make out more than dim shapes, but she knows that if she walked in, she would be able to navigate by feel alone.

"How?" she whispers.

"Things got a spirit. Make a mark on the world. You just can't see it normally." He's beside her now, and he reaches up and lays a hand against the other door, pressing slightly and making it rattle on its hinges. "Back here, behind the shadow... Doesn't disappear right away. It sticks around." He takes a step back and nods up at it. "Give this a few years, it'll fade. Depends on just how long it was there before they took it down."

Slowly she returns the knife to its sheath and turns, her hands dropping to her sides. She already knows what she's going to see. She knows, but it doesn't make it any easier, doesn't keep her knees from wobbling and her gut trying to crawl into her ribcage, when she looks beyond him up the yard at the house looming like a cliched haunted mansion beneath the stars.

Dark. Silent. Empty. It _is_ haunted. It's a ghost.

She could to it. She could go in and wander its rooms.

A phrase comes to her out of nowhere - she has no idea where she got it from, probably some long-forgotten book assigned in school - and it runs icy fingertips down her spine as it echoes through her mind.

 _All is silent in the halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin._

"What is this place?" The words escape her on a breath, and until Daryl answers her she wonders if he even heard her.

"We call it the Scead. Was here a long time before us. Since the beginning, probably."

"I thought you called it the shadow."

" _Scead_ means shadow." He gestures at the place where the tear in the world closed. "The gates are how we get in. Some of 'em we make. Some we find."

 _We._ "Like... that meadow?"

"Not exactly. That was like a room. This..." He huffs a laugh. "This is the entire goddamn world. So." He crosses his arms and tilts his head, his face entirely lost in his own shadow except for his green-gold mirror eyes, his expression unreadable but that thread of amusement still edging his voice. "You got any idea why the fuck there's one right where your barn used to be?"

"You..." She shakes her head, mildly incredulous. "You tell _me_. I didn't even know what it _was_."

"'s your barn, girl. Your land."

"Yeah, maybe not." All at once everything in her is going cold, almost numb. It's the house, maybe. Probably. She can't stop looking at it, at its lightless windows - light won't ever shine in them again. If it ever did here. If any light ever shines here except the stars. Without her intending it, without her even being being aware, her feet have started carrying her toward it, off the packed dirt and onto the grass.

If she went in, would there be someone waiting for her?

"I don't know why it's there," she murmurs. "I don't know anything."

He's following her, wordless, and she lets him follow. He has only a fraction of her attention anyway. The rest of it is on the house, on the fields beyond it. The black outlines of the old trees. Those distant and gracefully rolling hills beneath all that diamond-flecked sky. The pale gravel drive, the long ribbon of the road at its end - shimmering.

That hadn't been her imagination.

This is the world she's been seeing fragments of. She knows it. Or it's a hidden face very much like that one, yet another she never knew was there.

Just how little of the world has she been seeing her entire life?

A bird calls somewhere - a long and complex cry unlike any she's ever heard. Of course it would be like that. She's not surprised. She barely wonders at it.

She stops at the porch steps, gazing up at the front door. It would be so easy to walk up there and open it - they often didn't lock it, and anyway she has her doubts about the workings of conventional locks in a place like this. It would be easy to walk through that door and into those halls of the dead and those rooms of ruin and sit down in the one room where it all happened. Sit there and be alone and be _alive,_ and not belong in there any more than she belongs out here.

Her fists are clenched so hard her nails are digging painfully into her palms.

"Probably no one knew about it," Daryl says softly. Almost gently. She wonders if he can sense her mood, maybe even smell her, if he knows that once again she's holding herself together with both shaky hands. "Probably it's been here forever. That happens sometimes. They get forgotten."

"Could those things have gotten to us through it?" Her voice is as flat and cold as she feels, the door eating up her vision. "You think that's how it could've happened?"

"Maybe." She hears him shifting behind her, the sound of his boots crushing the grass. "You can use 'em to travel. Sometimes a long way. But they wouldn't necessarily need it." He pauses and releases a breath, and in it she can hear his discomfort. Finally. He _should_ be uncomfortable again; she shouldn't be the only one. "There's all kinds of ways they coulda gotten to you, Beth."

"What happens if I go in there?"

"It happen in there?"

She nods, still not looking at him.

"Then I wouldn't."

"Why not?"

"When bad shit happens somewhere, it leaves a mark too." He pauses again. "It'd probably be pretty ugly."

And that's all the push she needs. "I have to," she says, and she starts to climb the steps. "I have to see it."

"You'll be sorry. Don't be a fuckin' idiot." Following behind, boards creaking under his feet, under hers - Christ, even the _boards,_ that one that was always louder than the others, that always sounded to her like it was in pain. As a little girl she would try to skip it, afraid she was hurting it. "Beth-"

"Is it dangerous?" She turns on him in front of the door, hand on her knife again, not missing the way his eyes drop to it as he stumbles to a sharp halt. "In there. Would there be anythin' that could hurt me?"

He sighs, clearly exasperated - and more. He _really_ doesn't want her to go in there; she can see his face now, one side caught by a wash of starlight, and she can't miss the tension at the corner of his mouth. The way he's biting at the inside of his lip. "Don't-"

"Is it? _Tell me._ "

She doesn't mean to say it like that. But that's how it comes out. Not asking him, not even demanding. _Commanding._ She says it, and though he doesn't move she sees him rock back a step, sees his eyes fall to the side and his chin lowered. And she realizes how easy it is. Just like that. She can tell him to do something, and he'll drop the exasperation and the impatience, and he'll _do it._

"No," he says softly. "Ain't dangerous."

It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good at all. Ridiculously, she feels like apologizing.

Instead she reaches down and touches his hand. He stiffens, flicks his gaze to it, but he doesn't pull away.

"Thank you," she says, just as soft - and a strange thing happens.

He shivers. It's quick but it's there, and it's strong how it takes him. He shivers, eyes closed, drawing in a quick little breath, and when he turns his face back to the light she's sure that what she sees there is a strange kind of pleasure, suffusing him like the starlight itself.

Then it's gone.

"I have to do this," she whispers. And she turns away from him and opens the door.

As she thought, inside it's silent. Even her footsteps seem muffled as she walks into the front hall, her boots on the age-polished hardwood. His too, nothing more than a faint scuffling. She stops and stands there, listening, breathing, taking in the wide doorways to the dining room and the kitchen beyond, the living room on the other side, the long stairway in front of her. The bench beside her, the place where they used to keep shoes. The old brass mirror further in with the vines wrapping around its sides. The edge of the dining table, dark and glossy - she can see it from where she is. Their wide, tall china cabinet, the plates and figurines in her family for generations - standing among them the little porcelain Japanese woman with daintily painted kimono and parasol that she always hoped to have for her own. The pictures on the walls, all through the house - baby pictures, graduation pictures, wedding photos, vacations, birthdays and holidays and summer picnics.

The grandfather clock in the living room. She knows it's there because it must be. But she can't hear it.

She turns and walks toward that absence of sound, and she hasn't even reached the doorway when she sees.

She remembers. It's like stepping into one of her dreams. Except here there's no fire, no naked scabby many-toothed monstrosities cavorting before it. It also is dark and silent, which somehow makes the blood spattering the walls that much worse.

No bodies. Just blood. Blood pooling on the floor - she's standing in it, her boots sending tiny ripples across its still surface when she moves. Smudges of blood across the furniture, the sofa, one long smear across the floor where someone tried to crawl away, was caught, dragged backward. Handprints. A couple of clear footprints. The armchair her father favored, soaked in it. It's dripping down the legs and _pat-patting_ to the puddle beneath it. The poker lying in front of the fireplace, coated in it. The walls aren't just spattered; they're also smeared as well, one or two more handprints, a long arc of spray that she guesses must have been arterial.

Silver light streaming in through the big front windows. Turning it all black.

Daryl standing next to her, as silent as the house.

"There's a lot of blood in people," she says, and in her own ears she sounds like a wondering child and it makes her sick.

"How many?"

She's never heard him sound like that - not when he told her what he was to her, not when he agreed to help her, not even when he was whispering to her in that language she didn't understand. Gentle. Solemn.

Enraged.

She can hear it in him, the sickle-curve of something like a claw, something ready to rend and tear, and part of her born on the night everyone else died smiles at the sound.

"Daddy. Mama. My sister Maggie and my brother Shawn." She repeats them like a mantra, like something she's said over and over, because she has. "They tried to run. They didn't have time. Didn't even really have time to scream. I'm guessin' they went after their throats." She's talking evenly, almost conversationally, walking deeper into this abandoned slaughterhouse. Making her own bloody tracks. "I was upstairs. I wasn't feelin' well, I went to bed early."

"Why'd you come down?"

"I dunno. I woke up. Somethin' wasn't right. I just knew." She stops again in the center of the room and turns in a slow circle. Daryl slides into her vision and out again, her focus passing him by. On a very deep level, right now, he doesn't matter. "By the time I got down here it was all over. They were already dead. Those... Those _things_ were eating them."

"Yeah. They do that." He steps past her and she's freshly aware of him - and feels a kind of dull resentment for it, as if he shouldn't be here at all much less be speaking. But he's looking around, studying the carnage with that keen cast returned to his eyes, and she knows it's best right now to let him look.

She didn't come in here for this. But it's happening now.

"Makes no sense. Why they'd come like this. Why they'd... They're opportunistic. They're like scavengers that also kill - they go after weak ones. Sick ones. Your family was strong." He inhales, long, and she sees it all of a sudden - more vividly than she ever has before. The shadow inside him, behind him like his own _Scead,_ the eyes and claws and teeth. The wolf just beneath his skin. "There was a lotta life here. For a while. Light."

"Yes," she murmurs. "There was."

"They came and they just..." He glances back at her. "Outta nowhere?"

She nods.

"They burned it all down?"

She nods again.

He turns, his movements deliberate - deliberate in the way a predator moves when hunting. Every step through the world carefully gauged. Every motion an element of a strategy that exists purely on the level of instinct. "I have to know why this happened." He takes another breath, this time through bared teeth, and his incisors gleam. His eyes are glowing, and she's not sure the light is entirely reflected. "I'll help you."

He's said it already. But not like this. Not commanded, not tugged into it by the pleading of a little girl with a scarred face and an inclination to be mildly annoying. He says it, and she knows he means it on his own, and it's a hunter's promise. A killer's promise.

For a year she's wanted blood. Now she has him, and he's searching for the scent.

"Thank you," she says, and again she touches his hand.

This time he doesn't shiver.

* * *

[Note:] The line about the "rooms of ruin" is not mine; it's borrowed from Stephen King's _The Waste Land_.


	13. we're at the start, the colors disappear

fyi, the big dorky Howl guide (dynamicsymmetry dot tumblr dot com/post/129733980656/howl-a-guide) has been updated with some glossary words, as well as a new section of common/useful phrases.

In general I'll be trying to add all kinds of information to that document as it becomes important to the story. Expect a section on magic to be up by this evening, if not sooner.

And if anyone wants a visual of the Scead and a tiny bit more info, is here: dynamicsymmetry dot tumblr dot com/post/130657774456/thank-you-for-posting-the-visual-pics-of-the

Thank you for reading, wonderful people.

* * *

 **Chapter 13: we're at the start, the colors disappear**

"What happened after you found 'em?"

Daryl has pulled out his pack of cigarettes and Beth seizes her chance, reaches over and nabs one. He looks at her for a few seconds, the corner of his mouth twitching, then slides one between his own lips and goes back into his pocket for his lighter. "Told _me_ off for takin' one of yours without askin'. You're a damn hypocrite."

She ignores him, leans forward so he can light hers, inhales deeply. It does what it always does - steadies her and seems to flood up into her head, perversely clearing it. They're outside now, sitting on the porch steps, and that's probably helping. The ghosts are still present in the silent halls of the dead, but it's all a bit more manageable.

The weird bird calls its weird call again. She wonders if it's a bird at all. She remembers that thing she saw in the air, which she's now _certain_ wasn't her imagination. Though she's not yet ready to call it what's she's additionally certain it was.

"Why do you wanna know?"

"'cause it might be important."

She blows a stream of smoke through her nose and crosses her legs at the ankle. "I told y'all everythin' when I met your pack."

"Yeah, no. You left out details." He regards her steadily, sitting sideways one step above her - top step, his back against the post of the railing. "You didn't say how many. You didn't say their names."

"I said I don't remember what happened after."

"You must've started remembering somethin' at _some_ point. Where's it pick up again? What was goin' on?"

She pulls in a long, smokeless breath and looks away, out at the yard. She doesn't remember running, but she must have. She doesn't remember picking up what she was carrying. She doesn't remember getting the wounds on her face.

They took even that memory from her.

"I was over there." She points with the cigarette. Daryl's bike, she notices, is nowhere to be seen. "I was..." She swallows. She can do this. He wants to help. He _cares_ now. "I was holdin' my daddy's head."

He doesn't say anything to that, at least not immediately. She looks back at him; he's staring at the spot she pointed out, motionless, face once again lost in the darkness. The coal of the cigarette's end is pale, hardly more than the lightest pink. There's so little color here.

"You wanted to save him," he murmurs finally, and she nods as her throat closes up. That he gets it. That she didn't have to explain. That really... Really, she didn't even think about it exactly like that until now. She hadn't wanted to think about that specific part of it at all.

But yes. That's what she was trying to do.

"Wasn't your fault." He taps ash over the edge of the steps and fixes her gaze with his as the light once more touches his eyes. "You know that, right?"

She rolls a shoulder, lowering her head. It's not even half a shrug. "That's what the doctors told me. Over and over. Like if they could make me believe it, it would fix everythin'." She laughs, short and sharp and dry as a desert wind. "I know it, yeah. Makes no fuckin' difference."

"No," he says quietly. "I guess it doesn't." He pauses, face turned away again, then releases a long breath. "Doctors? You were in the hospital after? You get hurt?"

"Just my face. Some burns. Nothin' bad, nothin' worse than blisters." She bites at her lip, bites until she tastes thin copper. "Then I was..." She stops. She can't look at him. She can't do this. But she has to. She has to tell him things. Maybe not everything, but there are some things he has to know, and one of them is how bad it was. "I went back in for a while. They thought I was crazy."

"Were you?" Simple question. No judgment. She sighs.

"Yeah. I think I was. Not about this. I know what I saw." She can feel the old rage seeping into her voice like poison. It won't ever leave her. She won't ever forgive them this. "They drove me crazy, not believin' me. They wouldn't even listen. Except to tell me how fuckin' crazy I was."

She glances down when cool metal passes under her fingertip; without meaning to she's begun fiddling with the cuff on her left wrist, and she stills her hand. No. This is a place she won't go to. He doesn't get to know about this.

Not yet.

"That's bullshit," he says quietly, and falls silent again.

And for a little while there's nothing except for the whisper of the breeze - here too - and the weird call of that weird bird. The breeze has a smell, she realizes - a fragrance, and after a moment or two she realizes what it is.

Cut grass. Sweet hay. The thick, heady scent of honeysuckle, the deeper smell of a sun-warmed horse's hide. The cool green of the swimming hole she always used to go to with Shawn and Maggie, with her friends from school and church. Summer. She's smelling all those lost summers. Their ghosts. They all left some kind of mark too. But it's October.

Maybe it's lingering just like the barn.

"Where'd you get the knife?"

She starts, twitches her hand, and a long column of ash drops off the end of her cigarette and drifts over the worn toes of her boots. "What?"

"The knife. You said it was a _family heirloom._ " He grunts, exhales. "Hell of an heirloom."

"Oh." Her fingers are shaking a bit as she takes a long drag, but when she withdraws the stub of paper and ash, they're shaking less. "I dunno. I dunno where I got it. I mean..." She sighs smoke. "They said a few things in the house didn't burn. Weren't even really singed. Freak thing, they said it happens in most big fires. Some stuff survives and there's no reason. It was one. That blanket in my place, that was another." That blanket that still smells like him. That blanket she's buried her face in, used to muffle her cries as her frantic fingers rocket her over the edge. "They brought 'em to me in the hospital. The blanket... Once Daddy told me my great-grandmother made it. The knife..." She looks away, at the shimmering road. "I never saw it before."

He grunts again. There's a thoughtful quality to it. "Who's _they?_ "

"People took me in. That aunt and uncle. Just the aunt was actually there with the stuff."

"So she said where it came from?"

"Yeah." Her eyes snap back to him, narrowed. She doesn't mind this, not exactly, because he _believes_ her and he _cares_ now and he's obviously trying to get a clearer picture so he can help her. But this specific line of questioning... "Why're you askin' me that? Why's it even matter?"

"'cause," he says slowly, tapping ash. "You ain't stupid. You saw my knife, you saw me use yours. You saw what it did to me. You think a lotta knives're made outta silver, lookin' like that?"

She shrugs. But no. She doesn't. For a brief period she was curious enough to look and she poked around online, scrolling through images and stores, trying search terms. She turned up hundreds of ridiculous and impractical-looking _collector's_ knives, fantasy bullshit, reproductions of stuff from video games and anime and _The Lord of the Rings._ But nothing that looked like hers.

Hers is not impractical. Hers was made to be pretty, yes. But first and foremost it was made to kill.

"That writin' on it? That's the _Reord a Bealu_. What we use for magic. _Us._ Someone didn't just put it there for the hell of it."

As he's been speaking she's reflexively drawn it out and is now gazing at it, at the etchings in the blade, the starlight sparkling across its graceful lines. "What's it say?"

" _Eac thes Cweal afnan adeadian._ " He pauses, leaves the words suspended in the air, and she fights back a startled shiver. His voice changes when he says it. His speech is normally gruff, clipped, a little gravelly - the speech of a rough man with a rough background. But he says these words and his voice smooths out, some of the consonants soft and delicate while others are hard and solid, his tone almost musical. There's a chanting quality in it that there hasn't been every other time he's spoken in what she gathers is the language of his own people, a rhythm. And as the last syllable fades she feels a slight crackle in the air and across her skin, like static electricity.

She would swear she sees it dancing along the edge of the blade. A scatter of tiny light, almost too quick to spot.

"What's it mean?" she whispers.

" _With this, Death will die._ It's a blessin'. Powerful one." He releases a long breath, his head tilted up to the stars. "And a curse."

"Oh." Somehow it's not a shock.

As if she already knew.

"So I'm thinkin' you can probably guess why I'd wanna know where you got it from." He swings his eyes down to hers, though he doesn't lower his head, and takes a drag on the last of the cigarette before flicking it into the dirt by the steps. "'cause a human wouldn't have no reason to have it. Usually."

"Maybe someone just ended up with it, didn't know what it was," she offers. Because the alternative, though she's only sensing the shape of it... No. That is just too damn weird. That's beyond the already overextended limit. "Y'know, at random. Like at a yard sale or somethin'."

"Yeah, I don't think so. Shit like that, it stays in families. Gets passed down. Don't end up in no yard sale. And people, _normal_ people... They don't like it. Somethin' wouldn't feel right to 'em, they wouldn't even wanna touch it. Sometimes they can't even see it. You can. You're touchin' it. Carryin' it around. Don't seem to bug you none." He shakes his head. "Girl, if that's in your family, there's somethin' goin' on with your family. Or was."

Okay, she has to go there now. Put words to it. He's not leaving her a whole lot in the way of alternative options. "You don't think..." She stops, tries again. "Someone in my family was-"

"Hathsta?" He shakes his head again. "Probably not. We'd usually be able to tell. We know human kids of our people. Kinfolk. _Niehsta._ And _you'd_ probably know. You'd be seein' behind the veil your whole life. You said it only started the night your family got killed. So no." He bites moodily at his thumb. "Could be that, I guess, but I'm pretty sure it's somethin' else."

"So _what,_ then?" She's starting to feel oddly desperate again, her gut rolling into a knot. She wanted answers, she wanted to understand, but it seems as though she's further away from that than she's ever been. All she has are more questions. It makes even less sense now than it did before.

"I dunno. That's what we gotta figure out." He gestures at the knife, still in her hand. "'cause I might be wrong, but I'm thinkin' that's key. Or one of 'em, anyhow."

"So we got a goddamn murder mystery," she murmurs, a wan smile tugging her mouth. It _is_ kind of funny. She thinks Daddy might smile too. He always had a healthy appreciation for the more absurd aspects of life.

"Somethin' like that." His own thin smile in his voice.

"Fightin' crime?" She actually laughs, the tiniest bit, and it feels pretty good. She sheaths the knife and draws up her legs, hugs her knees. "That was never what I wanted to do when I grew up."

"Yeah, well," he mutters. He bites at his thumb again, gnawing the cuticle. "Don't always get a whole lotta choice."

It hits her hard and all at once, right in the chest - the words, the way he says them, with deep bitterness that twists the edges. She looks at him, her mouth working, and she has no idea what she's feeling. He hasn't complained, not once. He's been exasperated with her, irritated by her, but as far as she can recall he's never complained about this. About what happened and what's now going on.

"I'm sorry," she breathes, dropping her gaze to her hands. "Look, I didn't-"

"No." It comes sharply, direct, and she raises her head to see him staring at her with bright eyes and something almost fierce in the set of his jaw. "I wasn't talkin' about that. I wasn't."

"Oh," she says again, still hardly more than a breath, and suddenly it's hard to look at him. Something happened when he changed and held her, and since then she hasn't felt the stirring of that ferocious need for him. She hasn't felt that desire. Like she's forgotten it. But now it's back, though in a gentler form - a low burn inside her.

If she _could_ free him, would he go?

She clears her throat and shifts, pressing her thighs together and then releasing the tightness. "So what do we-"

There's a sudden gust of wind, more force in it than there's yet been, and he looks up, every muscle tense. Before she can ask him what it is he's on his feet, staring out across the paddock to the field beyond, to the little hill covered with bent and bowing trees where she used to play knights and princesses with a couple of long-suffering friends from school.

She peers. She can't see anything. But it's clear that he can, and she remembers that his low-light vision is probably much better than hers. He might be able to see further, too.

She glances at him. "What is it?"

"There's somethin' up there." In two steps he's down on the grass, already striding toward it without a look back. "C'mon."

Once again, he's not leaving her with many alternative options.

It's a good thing she doesn't want any.

* * *

She almost has to trot to keep up with him, his long strides - he's taller and longer than her but not really by _that_ much, but he moves with an easy swiftness that seems almost inhuman. Which of course it _would_ be, but halfway across the field she's getting annoyed, because doesn't he _know_ that she's trailing? She's about to ask him to slow the fuck up a little when she looks ahead up the hill-

And almost stops dead.

The light is soft, pale, ghostly, and seems to be flitting to and fro through the trees. For a few seconds she's half certain that it _is_ a ghost, but then again the wind gusts toward them down the slope and she realizes that it's only the dipping and swaying of the boughs themselves. The light - and its source, presumably - appears to be stationary.

"What is it?"

"I dunno." His hand is on his knife, she sees as she finally catches up. She looks at it, thinks abruptly about the killing machine he becomes when he's in fierd - the word coming quickly to her now - and wonders about his need for it. But there are a hell of a lot of things here that she can't hope to understand. At least not yet. "Gonna find out."

"Think it's dangerous?"

"Could be."

Her hand finds her own knife as her chest tightens. She's not afraid, especially not with him here, but she's hoping to not have to use it.

 _Are you?_

Two thirds of the way up the hill she starts to see it emerging through the trees, and as it takes shape it's yet another thing which, as it turns out, isn't surprising her. It should - it should be shocking to her. Yet another thing she's never seen, never felt, never even imagined was here. Yet there it is, and it's almost as if she expected it.

At the top of the hill in a wide stretch of grass there is - or there should be - an ancient stone chimney stack, the last remnant of a long-demolished cabin. She used to make it the center of a lot of her games, and when she got older she and Maggie and Shawn would light fires in the summer and roast marshmallows and hot dogs on sticks cut from the trees. It's a good place, a place possessed of a lot of happy memories - though she hasn't thought about it in a while.

It's not there.

It should be. It's been there forever; it should have left its mark on the world. As far as she knows it's _still_ there, back in her world, in the world where it's late afternoon. But here it's gone, and in its place...

" _Fuck_ me," Daryl breathes, halting with his hand on one thick, sagging branch.

It's not like in the meadow. There's no stone circle, for one thing, but for another the statue looks and feels _newer_ somehow, its lines both sharper and smoother. It's white marble, glittering here and there as the starlight hits facets of quartz, and while the figure isn't fully naked - there's a long, flowing drape of carefully carved fabric - and her hair is tied up into braids and loose tendrils, looking almost like Classical Greek, in all the ways that seem important it's exactly the same.

The flowers. The crown of moon phases. The bones. The knife, and the cracking egg cradled in her hands.

And now Beth can see the subtle curve of a smile pulling at Eostre's lovely, full mouth.

"I didn't know," she whispers, frozen at Daryl's equally frozen elbow. "I never... I didn't _know._ "

He glances at her, and the light gathered around the idol catches his eyes and leaches them of color. "Girl, what the _fuck_ is up with your family?"

"I didn't!" For a single awful second she thinks she might actually start to cry again, not out of wracking grief or even anger but sheer exhausted bewilderment. She didn't know. She didn't know _anything._ It's clawing at her insides how little she apparently knew.

Though at least that terrifyingly intense arousal hasn't taken her this time. Other than about ready to buckle at the knees, she feels mostly normal.

"Jesus, alright. I believe you." He shakes himself and ducks, pushes the branch up and out of the way and turns aside, holding it for her. She stares at it, at him, throat working. Then she shakes herself too - she can't do this again, she can't falter when they're actually _finding_ something, even if it makes no sense - and moves under the branch, straightening up as he lets it go.

This is different, too. On the hilltop she remembers, the trees did indeed form a kind of wide grove, and one in particular loomed over the chimney stack, branches scraping the stone when the breeze stirred them. But that tree is as gone as the chimney stack, and the trees that remain are lower and more gnarled with age, gathered closer in, making not just a grove but nearly a kind of grotto.

There's a roof over their heads, a rough dome made of interwoven branches. The light is coming from everywhere, and like the darkness at the abandoned car factory it seems almost vaporous, a glowing fog that she sends into graceful swirls when she moves into it.

The grass beneath her feet looks like short-cropped silver witch-hair.

Daryl is moving slightly ahead of her and a few feet from the idol he stops, gazing up at it. It's a full head taller than he is and he tilts his head back, his lips parted. Beth can't fully see his face, but something about the set of his mouth and his shoulders sets her wondering whether he might fall to his knees.

But instead he turns, and once more his eyes are glowing. Not green-gold; it's as if the light has collected in him and is shining from the inside. His teeth are shining too, though he's not baring them; his long incisors look longer than usual. Her breath catches and she almost takes a step back - not out of fear.

She couldn't say why.

"This place ain't dyin'," he says softly. "This place is powerful. They shouldn't have been able to come _near_ this. They shouldn't have been able to come near you. Any of you. This whole farm should've been protected."

"Well, they did," she whispers. "It wasn't."

"No. It wasn't." He turns back to the idol and she sees that his fingers are twitching at his sides, tips rolling over each other. " _Gyden,_ what the fuck _happened_ here?"

"I didn't know," she murmurs again, crossing her arms. Almost hugging herself. It's not that she feels cold; if anything it's warm here. Warm like spring sunshine. "I didn't... How the hell didn't I know?"

"You didn't know about the Night Gate, either. If you weren't seein' behind the veil before that night there's no way you would've." He shoots her a look. "Quit beatin' yourself up. Ain't go no reason to."

They're nice words. She's heard them before and they did no good then. She _told_ him, told him it didn't matter, but here he goes anyway. She grits her teeth and focuses on the idol. On the light. On that little smile.

He's just trying to help.

He's not looking at her anymore anyway. He's moving again, walking counter-clockwise around the statue, gaze unwavering. Studying it. Suddenly he drops, and she hears the rustle of grass and dead leaves. She hears the odd human-inhuman sound of him sniffing.

"There was blood here." He shifts, half crawls back around to the front and crouches, hand on the idol's flat base. "More here."

She bends, examining where his fingers splay against the marble. She can't see anything but glowing white. But she doesn't think he's _seeing_ what makes him certain. "Any idea what it was? Someone get hurt or somethin'?" _More killing? Even here?_ But she glances up at one of Eostre's extended hands, at the cords braided with animal bones, and she wonders about the nature of this goddess's _protection._

"Not human. Not Hathsta. Squirrel, maybe. Bird." He rocks back on his heels, eyes fixed upward as he tugs at the scruff on his chin, and when he speaks again it's low enough and soft enough that she's sure he's speaking mostly to himself. "Someone was _here._ Someone was makin' sacrifices. Keepin' rites."

"How long ago?"

"Not that long." He pushes to his feet, dusting off his hands on his pants. "Month. Maybe two."

"They all died last fall."

She says it hard. Flat. It feels like a chip of stone in her mouth, heavy on her tongue, cold seeping into her veins and down into her fingertips. She's going numb from the edges inward. This place. Her land. These things she never knew. And now.

"So it's someone else." Soft, gentle as she is hard. Suddenly the warm air is warmer, and she looks away from Eostre's cryptic amusement to see Daryl standing close, head slightly bent to her. She takes a breath and holds it, wills feeling back into her legs, and as she does he raises a hand and touches her upper arm.

Just a graze of his fingertips. But there's more warmth, spots in her skin beneath those points of contact that ripple outward, unfreezing her.

"Who?"

"No fuckin' idea. But I don't think we're gonna find out just standin' here. C'mon." He nudges her back toward the edge of the grotto, almost herding her - and not in a way she minds. She doesn't want to be here anymore. She doesn't want to look at that pristine carved face. Eostre's smile is beginning to feel just a bit smug. He's right. There's nothing else here.

Nothing she wants, anyway.

* * *

"Are we stayin'?"

Most of the way back to the barn, walking beside him, she half turns and asks him. It comes out sounding weary, and she is - more than she even realized. In the house she had known, on the porch too, and in the hilltop grotto she felt it more deeply still. But every step back toward where the gate closed after them has been like walking through increasingly deep water, and she's positive that once she's on the bike with her arms wrapped around him, she's going to doze the whole way back. She just wants to crawl into bed.

She wants to crawl into bed with _his_ arms wrapped around _her_. She knows that too. Not to fuck him. It doesn't matter what form he's in. She doesn't care.

She just doesn't want to lie down alone. Not after this.

He glances sidelong at her, hands in his pockets. Like her, he's been silent since leaving the grotto, and she gets the sense she's startled him the smallest bit. He rolls a shoulder, hair falling half across his face.

"Not unless you wanna."

"I don't." She didn't turn her head to look at the house when they passed it, leaving it a dark hulk at the periphery of her vision. She won't look back now. It wasn't a mistake to come here, and it wasn't worthless. Now, more than ready to leave, she's not sorry. It was good, if for nothing else than that now he _wants_ this, and it's not just because of her.

But she wants to be done.

"What do we do now?"

He grunts. "Gonna think on it. Might wanna take it back to Rick, he could-"

The Ytend melt out of the shadows beneath the trees.

Five of them, she thinks later. She'll be fairly solid in that estimate. Five of the things, crawling on all fours through the grass, lifting themselves to bound like naked scabby dogs, all claws and infernally grinning teeth and blank dead eyes. Five of them in a pack, spreading out to surround her and him, cackling and hissing and lolling their thin tentacle-like tongues.

Five later. For now it's just a blur of them, bone-white in the starlight, and she hears his tight exhalation as she gropes in pure instinct for her knife, turning - also without conscious thought - so her back is to his. Now that they're surrounded, the Ytend are slowing, crawling again with their jaws open wide, teeth like serrated blades gleaming dully. She can see what must be blood crusted around their mouths, between their fangs. She can see their raw skin, pus oozing from broken sores.

 _They're sick,_ she thinks. _God, they're_ sick, _they're all sick, what the fuck._

All the ones she's ever seen have been like this. She just never noticed before.

Then there's no more time for noticing. The one directly in front of her lunges for her and she kicks out to meet it, slashing down with the knife - slicing open its shoulder and sending it reeling back with an angry screech. More screeching, more blurs; she knows as she slashes again that they're going for Daryl, knows that she can't help him this time. If anything she'll be the one needing help - she's not weak but she's also not stupid.

His deep growl and cracking bone, and the bizarre feeling of him changing right at her back. Changing _against_ her, growing, swelling, filling the world.

Heat pulses into her, and it's not lust.

At least not only.

The one she hurt lunges again, throws itself fully at her; she spins aside and swings blindly, hears another pained yowl and sees it sprawl into the grass with a long, deep rip down its back, steaming and blistering as the silver does its work, all black blood and pale exposed bone. She turns, already looking for the next one, and as it leaps for her she sees him rearing back in the starlight, holding one of them high as he plunges his claws into its gut and drags out a glistening tangle of intestines. He hurls it aside with a snarl and tears another off his shoulder, slams it to the ground.

Then she has her hands full. More than her hands; the Ytend hits her chest and she goes down with it on top of her, all the breath knocked out of her, stars flashing in her eyes that have no place in the sky. Teeth snapping just above her face; its breath smells like a rotting slaughterhouse and she gags, knife handle slipping in her fingers. Bright pain lances down her side - the side she hurt that first night in the alley - and she yelps, twisting in spite of it, trying to bring her hand up. She can feel it, its claws in her, and it's like they're snagging on her fucking _lungs_ but she shoves the pain aside as she shoves _herself_ upward, just enough to unbalance it.

Just enough to ram the point of the knife into the side of its throat, jerking her face away as its blood sprays.

It's writhing, thrashing; she thrusts it off her with her knees, and as it rolls away - screaming and flailing and bleeding all over everything - she scrambles up and swings a leg over, straddles it, stabs down and yanks the knife free and stabs again. She doesn't even care what she's stabbing. All she cares about is making it lie still.

At some point it does.

She tumbles back into the grass, gasping, trying to turn over and see what's happened to Daryl. Everything went away before; she didn't even hear him anymore. But he's there, black fur shining and matted with blood-

Holding the knife.

She blinks. It's incongruous. Steady as a man on his hind legs, one hand out as the remaining Ytend circles him, his knife gripped in his other, and it's _bigger._ She's sure it is. Grown to fit him, to fit his size, and he's wielding it with all the dexterity she would expect of a human.

He's not an animal like this. He's something much more.

"C'mon," he breathes - only it's not that. It's close, but not exactly. But by his tone she's guessing it means the same thing, and the Ytend obliges. It springs and _curves_ midair, clearly meaning to hit him in the side, and he whirls, arching himself out of the way, stabbing under and up just as it passes him and burying the knife in the base of its skull.

He grabs the thing by the neck, pulls the blade free. The Ytend drops without a sound.

And it's just him and her, panting, staring at each other with their weapons dripping into the grass.

 _Shed blood together,_ she thinks. Rick and his quiet, calm drawl. _Shed blood in battle._

 _Yes, we did._

"Beth." So he can also say her name when he's like this. That's interesting. He sounds worried, the way he's saying it. Worried and now a dark shape against the sky, rushing forward.

But she's fine. The watery feeling in her legs is nothing. Neither is the wet heat at her side. She's fine, she's trying to tell him, and then the cool grass reaches up and pulls her down into itself, closes her eyes for her, and finally she can rest.


	14. you'll never know unless we go

Writing this took a lot out of me; it's been a tiring week or so and I might need a break. I'll try not to make it too long a one, if it ends up being necessary.

As usual, the worldbuilding guide's glossary on my Tumblr will be up to date as of this posting.

Thank you as always, lovely people.

* * *

 **Chapter 14: you'll never know unless we go so let me show you**

Her dreams roar.

They're dark. Light. Dark again. Moving bands of it like her window. Spilling across the floor. Speed grabbing her body, pulling it back. Stroking through her hair. Hard heat all against her, legs spread. Riding. She hurts so much, she's burning, she's on fire from the marrow out. Holding onto him, clinging and not even with her own arms, because she can't pull away.

Bound to him.

Bars of light across her eyelids. Red. Him, the dark, on her knees. Spread open. God it fucking _hurts_ but she doesn't care. How she needs him in her. How hungry she is. Lifting her, holding her close, and she can smell his blood, his sweat, his smoke, his leather. His wolf. Hand on her thigh, arm under her back, his fingertips brush the side of her breast. She moans; he could make the pain go, or he could at least make it not matter. Inside her, teeth against the back of her neck. The points of his claws against her belly. Fur on her skin, stroking her as he moves. As he fucks her, fucks her fast and deep, takes her for his own.

Except this time it's not so hard. This time he's being careful with her. He's being so sweet to her. She wants to hold onto him like he's holding her, bury her hands in all that thick fur, let him lift her. Walking, dark all around. Crunch of grit under his boots. Puff of cool, musty air. She senses the dimensions of a vast and lonely room.

Stairs. Yes, he can take her where he wants her. She doesn't even want _that._ Just to be with him. Lie down with his arms around her. She's so tired. He gathered her in, before. Into himself. His smooth voice, his whispering. Those words she never needed to understand, because didn't she understand them anyway?

She feels like she did. Some part of her.

Laying her down. Not in the grass. Not very soft and the pain flares when he does, and she whimpers and twists a little, trying to shift away from it. Escape.

His heat, so close. Thick, rough hand on her arm, on her neck. On her head. Gentle.

 _Seft._ That's what it sounds like he's whispering. _Seft, magden._

He's gone.

Light. Not bands or bars. Red light, flickering. She tries to blink with her eyes closed, tries to turn her head away from the light. Her side yells and she almost yells with it - a weak croak. Movement nearby, scuffling beside her, and a hand slid under the back of her head to help her drink when the plastic neck of a bottle is pressed against her lips.

Water. She almost gulps; he withdraws it. Leans in, mutters at her to slow the fuck down, she'll puke all over his goddamn bed. Gives her the bottle again; she drinks more slowly even as her tongue and throat weep for it, pitiful. She drinks and it flows it into her. _He_ flows into her. Fills her.

He lays her down and he's gone again.

She tries to open her eyes; she might. All she can see is a red-orange-black blur and a shape moving against it. Moving toward her, lumbering like a perambulatory mountain. Not big, not really; just close. Sound of something being set down on the floor by her head.

She's being lifted once more. Just her upper body. Her jacket slid off her shoulders. The pain spears fresh and bright down her side and she moans, twitches; he holds her tighter as he tugs at the hem of her shirt. It sticks, her skin clings to it; it pulls, _yanks,_ and she cries out as he draws it up and raises her arm so he can get it over her head.

Cool air on her naked skin. She doesn't even want him to fuck her anymore. He touches her, big warm hands on her as he rolls her over, and she attempts to cringe away from him. Why can't he leave her _alone?_ Before... Before, he was across the room and she couldn't make him come to her. Give her what she truly needed.

Her lips move. No idea what she says. _Please,_ maybe. And she feels his rough fingers stroking her hair out of her face, soft even if his voice isn't.

"Jesus, wouldja hold the fuck still? You're gonna rip it open again."

 _Ripping_ seems bad. And his voice... Hard, sure. Terse. But there's that same softness beneath.

She feels safer.

She bites her lip, clenches her fists at her sides, squeezes her eyes shut until the shifting firelight disappears in a deeper field of dancing stars. And she doesn't cry out again - not even with the cool stinging he swabs onto her side - until he starts to stitch.

Then she just cries.

* * *

When she returns she's still hurting and it's like fighting her way through a dense fog - like her own Scead, though not like Daryl's - but all of her is there.

She thinks.

She blinks sticky eyes, recognizes the candlelight as such. She's on her side, and can tell by the angle and the view of the room - and by the hint of the cold floor under the padding on which she's lying - that she's been placed on Daryl's bedroll.

He's there, sitting against the closed door and smoking with his knees bent upward and one forearm draped over his left. He's looking at her with hooded eyes, expression impossible to read. She holds his gaze for a few seconds, and then, when he offers nothing more than that, she directs her attention toward herself again.

She's covered with a thin sheet. She moves a little, risks a stretch and doesn't encounter too much pain, and the contact with the bedroll and the fabric confirms it: from the waist up she's naked.

She stares at him, trying to kick her logy brain into some kind of processing. What happened before... Why she hurts this much. Why he has a nasty looking gash running from low on his left cheek down his throat, still crusted with blood. Why she's here at all. Why _they're_ here.

It's not all there. But enough of it is. Whether it's the veil with the partial effect it can apparently have on her, or some kind of injury actually sustained in that patchy area of her memory, she has no idea and in terms of her present state it doesn't matter. Standing there with him, face to face, her and this beautiful monster, weapons dripping with the blood of the kill.

She remembers that. Right before the world reduced itself to cool, dark grass, she remembers that. She remembers how under the pain it felt good.

Felt right.

She wants to talk, so she does. There's one question in particular that seems to be asserting itself.

"How'd I get here?"

Because as far as she can recall - or _not_ recall, technically - she was unconscious that whole time. Not dozing; unconscious. Holding onto him on a bike? For two hours? Wounded?

 _Magic._

That's sort of what she's expecting, pulling the sheet closer around herself, turning her head so both eyes are above the level of the slightly lumpy pillow. But instead Daryl rolls a shoulder and offers her a minuscule and rueful smile.

"Tied you on the back." He pauses for a beat. "Tied you to me."

 _Oh._ She's silent, digesting this. Well, it's practical. And he had seemed so certain on their way out to the farm that she was safe, safe enough to not require a helmet. So maybe some of it _is_ magic. Protection of some kind.

God, who the fuck knows.

"I..." She trails off as she tries to push herself up with one shaky hand while keeping the majority of herself covered by the sheet. She has no reason to feel this kind of need for modesty, not after how things proceeded after she saved him - after _he_ saved _her_ \- but she does, and it gnaws at her. He undressed her. He did it because he had to - though she hasn't seen it, the sharp, burning, but bearable twinge in her side suggests that he took care of that. Sewed her up, maybe. Maybe even had some painkillers for her. And it feels like it goes higher now. Beneath where a bra would have sat.

He undressed her for the most practical reasons possible. But he did. Hands on her bare skin.

This didn't mean anything that first time, because then she didn't want him to fuck her quite literally like an animal.

She doesn't know what to say. She sits awkwardly, favoring her side with the sheet clutched to her chest, and looks at him. He meets her eyes for a few seconds and then drops his, hair falling in his face and cigarette burning down between his fingers. "Didn't know what else to do," he mutters. "Couldn't do no hospital. They'd ask too many questions."

She half shrugs, offers him her own tiny smile. "Ain't got health insurance anyway."

He sits forward, crossing his legs. "How're you feelin'?"

"Fuckin' hurts," she breathes as she shifts - almost slips into a moan. And she's dizzy - not much, but the ceiling keeps edging into weird angles and she's not sure she would want to try walking. "Guess it could be worse, right?"

"It coulda gutted you. Almost did." He gestures vaguely in the direction of her side with the cigarette. "Stitched you up pretty good. Look, don't do too much movin' around next few days, alright? Second time you fucked that up."

Her mouth twists. "Wasn't exactly my fault."

"No. Guess it wasn't." He rolls onto his knees, reaches over by the wall for a green plastic water bottle and crawls the few feet to her, holding it out. "Drink slow. You'll-"

"Puke all over, I know." She takes it and closes her lips over the spout, tips it back- and catches his expression as she does. Eyes slightly wide. Mouth twitching. Something like surprise, as if what she's said was unexpected - but she's not sure that's all it is.

She swallows, gives it time to find her stomach, swallows again and is oddly aware of the bob and flex of the muscles in her throat.

He's still watching her.

"You remember that?" he asks quietly when she lowers the bottle and hands it back.

"I remember some stuff. Not a lot. It's all pretty hazy. I think a lot of it's part dream." She pushes a knot of hair out of her face. "I remember before. Fightin'. All of that."

He nods, says nothing. Two of the tea lights he's arranged around the metal candle-holder plate flicker and gutter, throwing surreal angular shapes across his brow and cheeks. She thinks, watching him a bit dreamily – which is appropriate - that he's at his most beautiful when he's at his strangest. When this world isn't quite where he belongs and his human skin doesn't entirely fit him.

They're back here, away from the farm, and suddenly she can think along these lines again.

She clears her throat and withdraws her gaze, turns it to the candles and to the untidy stack of his clothes. "Can I have my, uh... bra? Shirt?"

He blinks at her, for a moment appearing not to comprehend her. Then something inside him clicks into connection and he crawls again, fumbling through an assortment of stuff at the foot of the bedroll. A battered laptop bag, the interior of which she catches a glimpse as he removes it, and sees - among other things - a case of syringes, bottles, bandages and gauze.

Under it, her shirt and bra. Tossed there, she gets the sense, and then ignored as he went to work. Hurrying, maybe. Probably.

She doesn't feel dangerously weak, but she must have lost a good bit of blood.

He hands them to her, and as he does so he appears – at least to her - as if he's trying to handle them as little as possible. He's once more not exactly meeting her gaze, his face angled down and to the side, and as she takes her clothes she doesn't need more than a few seconds to get what's going on.

"Sorry," he mumbles. "Had to, it goes real far up, I tried not to-"

 _Oh for fuck's sake._ Even as she's practically squirming, with her own discomfort and a few other things she doesn't want to look at too closely. "You already saw me naked," she says, gingerly angling herself away so her breasts are out of his line of sight. Not that he's looking anyway. He's very pointedly _not_ looking. "So."

"What?" It comes out in what she guesses most people would term a _blurt_ , except it obviously isn't something he's been holding in. It's sharp and a little high-pitched. "When the fuck?"

She looks over her shoulder in the act of hooking her bra, brow arched, somewhat amused. He doesn't sound at all like he's faking it. And she's not sure why he would; she's almost certain that since she met him he's never once lied to her. "After I got you back to my place. You were on the couch, I had my clothes off, was goin' to get clothes. Your eyes were open." She reaches for her shirt and maneuvers her arms into the sleeves, sliding it on over her head. "So."

He says nothing at all, and when she looks at him again, tugging her hem into place... It's difficult to tell what with the hue of the candlelight, but if forced, if really pushed to it, she might say he was blushing. "I don't remember."

"Well. Whatever." She turns herself back to face him, and despite the pain and the lingering throb in her head and the equally lingering dizziness, it's hard to keep from smiling. Yeah, she's pretty sure he's blushing. "I saw your dick, anyway."

He stares at her for a few seconds, then shakes his head and makes a face, pushing to his feet. "Stop."

She supposes she can.

He moves over to the wall by his pile of clothes, opens a small metal box and roots around in it. She takes the moment of lull to lift her shirt and twist as much as she can, see the wound itself. He has indeed dressed it, stitches invisible under a long line of bandages and tape, but there's something else under the bandages. She can see glimpses of it here and there, green and curled - something that looks like leaves and, when she leans awkwardly down, smells vaguely like rosemary.

She looks up to see him returning to her, a couple of little plastic pill bottles in his hands. Apparently the laptop bag isn't his full first aid stash. As he crouches beside her, she gestures up and down the dressing.

"What the hell is all that?"

"Yarrow."

The name is familiar. _Yarrow._ She knows she's heard it before, but casting about her - admittedly still hazy - mind, she's not coming up with any connections. "What's yarrow?"

"Plant." He uncaps one of the bottles and shakes two reddish oblong tablets into the crease of his palm, holds them out to her with the bottle of water. "Good for wounds. Helps stop bleedin'. Kinda antiseptic." He proffers the pills again. "Antibiotics are still a good idea, though. I'll give you some to take home." He pauses. "Unless you already got some, seemed like you had more than the basics."

She shakes her head. She _had_ antibiotics. Ran out... about a week ago, actually. She takes the pills, chases them with water. But as she's wiping her mouth on her sleeve, something about what he said strikes her.

"You think I can go home?"

He shrugs, setting down the other bottle - _Percocet,_ she catches on the label - and rocking back on his heels. "Ain't hurt all that bad. It didn't get you too deep. Mostly just made what was already there worse. Like I said before, shouldn't move around a whole lot for a while, but yeah." He glances around, nods at the bedroll. "Anyway, you really think you'd be comfortable here?"

The bedroll is thin, the floor hard and not exactly warm. Her pain isn't confined to her side. The Percocet is looking better and better to her, and she doesn't see that changing until she has some in her.

But her apartment. Dim, cramped. Spartan. So is this place, but this place...

He's in it.

Nevertheless. She ducks her head and sighs, winces when she moves a little too much in the wrong direction. "I guess. Okay."

He nods, and after handing her the bottle of Percocet he pushes to his feet, taking the antibiotics with him. She's expecting him to extend a hand down to her, but instead he bends his back and his knees again, grips her gently by the upper arms and lifts her, taking enough of her weight for her to get her legs under her while the world is still spinning. She squeezes her eyes shut, swaying a bit but held, and feels him close. Warm. His strong hands.

Safe.

"Y'alright?"

"Yeah." She's not sure she _is,_ but it's reflexive and she doesn't try to take it back. And when he releases her, she does indeed keep the floor under her. Takes a step and doesn't topple.

"Get some food into you. Some sugar. Soon, anyhow." He turns away, grabbing his jacket and - she now sees - hers and her belt and knife from atop his pile of clothes. Her knife looks clean; she imagines he had to do it very, very carefully.

He did that for her.

He's back at her side with a hand light on her shoulder. Still awkward. She can feel it, the tension in the fine muscles of his fingers. He's not sure how, with her. She's seen him touch his packmates, seen the ease with which he appears to do it, but when he's touching her it seems to be an entirely different matter. "Sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine." She takes her jacket and makes the mistake of attempting to fumble her way into it without assistance. He briskly swats her hands aside and helps her. The belt too. She can't find it in herself to be annoyed with him.

Maybe she slept for a few hours back there, but she's so tired.

"Alright," he murmurs, and opens the door.

The world is still not entirely stable, her legs not entirely solid, and walking is taking up a lot of her attention. But most of the way down the dark corridor the question comes out of her. She knows it's useless, knows there's no helpful answer - at least not yet - but it comes anyway, and though she's speaking softly it echoes into the dimness and through the door into the cavernous room beyond.

"What happened back there?"

 _With it? With them? With why they were there, why it was all there, what it all means?_

 _With us?_

Nothing. Nothing to accompany the dull clanky thuds as they descend the stairway - her more cumbersome than him and therefore more loudly, though she's managing more easily than she might have thought. Only needs to lean on his shoulder once. But as his boots touch the bottom he clears his throat and speaks.

"I dunno. I just..." He shakes his head. "Yeah. I dunno."

"But we're gonna find out?"

He jerks his head in something that might be a nod. Grunts. He's pretty clearly in a mood. She supposes that'll have to do.

* * *

It hurts to hold onto him, her side whining through every goddamn muscle in her body every time he leans them into a curve, but she dry-swallows a Percocet before she climbs onto the bike and this time he takes the quick way home. She has no idea what time it is, except that it's late enough for traffic to be minimal, the streets mostly quiet, the lights fewer and further between and odd in hue and cast in the way lights can be only after midnight. If it was late afternoon when he took her out of the Scead, and two hours back to town...

She's been asleep for a good long time.

She wonders if he made that happen. With drugs. With something else. Not for any unsavory reason - she stopped worrying about that a while ago - but simply to help her rest. The kind of thing he might do, she thinks.

 _Seft, magden._

She thinks she understands enough of that. His tone, if nothing else. Her head pressed between his shoulderblades, smelling leather and trying to ignore the throb in her side, his voice drifts up to her from the murkier depths of her memory.

Very low. Very gentle.

 _Alright, girl._

Girl.

She likes when he calls her that. The realization pulses warmth through her core in spite of the pain.

Then all at once they're there, parked in front of the little two-story place framed on either side by a defunct dollar store and a defunct bar. She turns her head and blinks sleepily at it, considering the prospect of getting herself into it; the Percocet has kicked in and the stretch of cracked, gum-spotted pavement between the bike and the door looks wider than normal.

Daryl sighs and pulls free of her drowsy embrace, swings his leg over the seat with one hand on her shoulder to steady her. She raises her head to look at him, all looming shadow in the inadequate street lighting - once again - and when he slides his hands under her arms and practically lifts her off the seat, she doesn't try to shrug him away. Doesn't try to protest that she's okay. She has nothing to prove. And she's not stupid.

And his hands feel good on her. Like they always have.

Once she's up it's a little easier, awareness seeping into her as if it's entering through her feet, and she shakes herself carefully and scrubs a hand over her face. Again Daryl hesitates before stepping back and letting her stand on her own, and he makes no move to leave her.

"Need me to come up?"

He offers it quietly. Gruffly, sure, but that's all, and there's still that quality of gentleness in it. He's not assuming she _does_ need him, he's putting it in her hands - but he's there.

And she's pretty sure he wants to be.

She doesn't have to consider. She nods, takes a few steps toward the door and continues as she feels steadier. She can hear him following, the scuffle of his boots on the pavement, and when she stops to grope for her key, his hand brushes her elbow. And she doesn't think it's an accident.

He's not comfortable with her touching him. He's not comfortable touching her. But he also seems to be having a difficult time stopping.

She creaks the door open and leads him up the dark stairs, fumbling her other key into the lock at the top. The room, when she pushes the door open, is chilly and illuminated only by the streetlight through the window - the window she opened partway into the relative warmth to air the place out and which she apparently forgot to shut.

She goes to the light and cuts it on, mutters a few obscenities and groans as she tugs the window closed. Once again he's behind her, officially hovering, and when she turns he's standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking around, looking at the couch - and looking awkward.

Honestly, she's not sure how else he should look. Some weird shit went down between the two of them in this room. Plus there's a wide, dark splotch of a bloodstain on the couch that she doesn't expect to be able to remove.

She moves past him, shrugging off her jacket and tossing it over the arm of said couch, belt and knife following. "I'm gonna hit the bathroom," she mutters. "I'll be back in a minute."

He says nothing. She hits the bathroom.

In there, door closed and the harsh greenish light flickering – like it always has - she leans her hands on the rim of the sink and regards herself in the mirror. What she can see is a disaster. She's dirty, her hair is a hopeless snarl, and her shirt is ruined beyond redemption. Jeans too. Bra. Panties. She must have bled all over everything.

She keeps losing clothes since she met him.

He hadn't looked bad, she suddenly realizes. He looks pretty together. Then again, he had plenty of time to take care of that while she was dead to the world.

Her mouth twists. She's not sure she likes that turn of phrase.

Carefully, she strips. She didn't escape unscathed totally apart from her side; she has a scratch on her arm and another on her collarbone, both of which look like they've been cleaned. She can tell she'll have a wicked bruise on her hip, another high on her left thigh. But otherwise she appears to be okay.

The savory smell of the yarrow packed against her wound is filling the small room. It's nice.

She'd love to shower but figures that's probably inadvisable just now. Instead she contents herself with working soap and a wet washcloth over the worst of it, washes her hands and face, makes a cursory attempt to haul a brush through her hair, then gives up and wraps herself in a towel and leaves her filthy clothes lying on the floor. As far as the hair goes, once or twice she's considered just hacking it all off. It's not like there's any real reason to keep it. Not like she has anyone to look any particular way for. _Little bald Beth,_ and she smiled wryly at the thought of it, but something is holding her back.

Well. Whatever.

He's seated on the couch when she emerges, hands loose between his knees, and when he looks up she can't quite read his expression - what little of it she can see through his hair and with the light by her bed at his back. Awkward still, but it feels like a different kind of awkward, and she doesn't know what category it belongs in.

She's also too tired to care. And the tiniest bit stoned.

Yet she does get some of it, as she crosses the room to the dresser - like she did that night, naked and bleeding and tired as she is now. His eyes on her; she thinks back and no, there wasn't any real consciousness in that gaze. He was aware of her. That was probably the extent of it.

But then there's everything that's happened since he left that first time. The things she's done in this room. Done to herself. In her bed. On the floor. Thinking about him. Now he's here. And she wonders...

Fuck, she wonders if he can smell it.

It's insane, pulling another loose tee and a pair of worn, plain panties out of the drawer. Literally insane to be thinking like this, after what happened today. What they saw, what they did, what she now knows and doesn't know, and what got her belly almost slit open. She stepped into a pool of the blood of her slaughtered family. She walked through the halls of the dead and the rooms of ruin. She fought and she bled and she killed. Fucking should be the absolute _last_ thing on her mind.

 _Or maybe it makes all the sense in the world._

Maggie's whisper. Knowing. She shakes her head; she doesn't at all like the thought that her big sister is watching this now.

She drops the towel and dresses as carefully as she undressed. She doesn't have to steal a glance over her shoulder to know that he's averting his eyes. And the thing is, she could strip it all off, go to him, stand over him and take his face in her hands and hiss _look at me now, then, if you don't remember it, you can look at me now and you can do a fuck of a lot more than_ look. _If you want to._ I _want to._

 _God, I fucking want to, please._

 _No._

In her mind it's like a heavy steel door slamming shut. One of those spinning locks they put on bank vaults. She can't do this now. Can't _be_ this.

Then her side moans, and just like that she doesn't actually want to anymore.

The Percocet drowsiness is settling over her again. She makes her way to the bed - knit blanket kicked down by the foot, all in a tangle - and sinks down onto it, drawing her bare legs up. She raises her eyes; he's watching her, his own eyes hooded in the dingy light, hands still dangling and his fingertips twitching almost imperceptibly like leaves stirred by the softest breeze. Silent, motionless, watching. And it takes her another few seconds to realize what he's doing.

He's waiting to be dismissed.

They go along like everything is normal - as normal as a murder investigation by a girl and a werewolf can be - like they're just in this together, like it's equal, and then he does something like _this,_ and she can't handle it at all. Staring at him, knowing it, it burrows into her and _gnaws_ \- that he's just _sitting_ there and it's submission so thickly overwhelming that he might as well be on his knees.

 _I'm fine, you can go,_ is what she's opening her mouth to say- but that's not what comes out. Because now she's not thinking about him looming behind her so huge and hungry, seizing her hips, _taking_ her. She's thinking about her face buried in his fur - how soft it was, how she just wanted to cry, break herself open and release it all, and he was there so she could and she didn't have to be alone. Finally. _Finally,_ after a fucking _year,_ she didn't have to be alone with herself anymore.

He stood in the room of ruin with her and she practically felt the force of his quiet rage, and he promised to help her.

He fought with her. Back to back. When she fell he lifted her up, carried her home.

 _Efensorge. Bemurnan._

 _Seft, magden._

She doesn't know what any of those words mean and she doesn't need to. All she knows is that she doesn't have to be alone.

"Please stay," she whispers.

He maintains his silence. Gazes at her. It's possible that something flickers behind his eyes, something that isn't reflected light.

"You don't have to." She tucks her legs close in to her chest, half reclining, pulling the rumpled covers up past her knees. Small. She feels small, and it's not entirely a bad feeling. "I'm not tellin'... It's not like that. You can go if you want, I'm okay, I just... It would be nice. If you'd stay. That's all."

Nothing. And suddenly she's once again afraid, irrationally and intensely, that she's crossed some kind of line that she didn't know was there, gone too far in the wrong direction, or just upset him somehow - nothing to do with any _laws_ or _traditions,_ just done something he really doesn't _like_ and might as a result not like _her._

And _does_ he like her?

A day ago she wouldn't have been able to answer. Now she's fairly certain that he does.

Or did.

Then he gets up. He does it slowly and she follows the progress of his shadowy body, biting her lip. Here's where he shakes his head, walks to the door and opens it and leaves, and she's alone in here, because that's always what happens in the end.

He stands. Then he shakes himself - oddly. Not a human movement. Head to shoulders, somehow originating from his core. And he starts to change.

She can't look away. It's faster than it was the first time he did it at her request, but it's still smooth, strangely flowing - remaking himself to fill twice as much of the world, rising so high he has to bend to keep his head from pressing into the tiles of the drop ceiling, shoulders hunched, folding into a crouch and each claw hitting the wood with a soft _click_.

Then shrinking again. Smaller and smaller, no longer crouching but genuinely on all fours, spine leveling out and legs even. He shakes himself again and his glossy fur ripples. His pale blue eyes are impossibly bright.

He regards her for a long moment, powerful jaws slightly parted and his teeth just visible. The pink tip of his tongue. Not quite panting. Then - as if it's no big deal at all - he trots the rest of the way across the room to her and springs up onto the bed, maneuvers himself against the wall, turns twice in a tight circle and flops down with a sigh.

It occurs to her that she should probably start breathing.

He's very big. Even curled up and pressed against the wall - which she assumes is probably courtesy on his part - he takes up nearly half the space. But she has no idea how she would ever get into the _vicinity_ of caring. She stares at him, covers clutched in her trembling hands, and she thinks she might just cry again.

She didn't ask for this part. He gave it.

"Thank you," she whispers. He raises his head, and without stopping to worry or second-guess it she extends her arm and lays her hand over him, between his ears – as warm and soft as she remembers with a slight curve that feels like it was made for her palm.

He freezes. But the tension that she's felt before isn't there now. He's just very still, gazing at her with those simultaneously human and profoundly inhuman eyes.

She isn't sure she should pet him. Not now, not like this. So after another few seconds she starts to withdraw-

And he tips his muzzle up and licks the back of her hand.

She gapes at him. Gapes at him until she realizes she's gaping and makes herself stop, because there is _no reason to make this weirder_ when it's already so fucking weird, when she's sure he wants her at arm's length at pretty much all times and then he pulls her in and holds her while she cries, curls up to sleep on her bed.

She doesn't get this at all. So she might as well go with it.

Anyway, there's something in his lupine eyes that might be mild surprise of his own.

Okay. All right. She turns, reaches over and cuts out the light, leaving only the bands of illumination from the window and the green-gold flash of his eyes. Which vanishes as he lays his head down and closes them, one paw tucked under his chin and his tail almost brushing his nose.

She pulls the covers up higher, arranges herself on her uninjured side. The pain hasn't left her, but it's faded into the background, an ache that can be ignored at least enough to allow her to sleep.

Without totally meaning to, she curls a little closer to the wall. Fully meaning to, she reaches out again, and her hand finds the back of his neck just behind his ears, close to the knob where his spine and skull meet. He stiffens - but almost immediately relaxes with another sigh.

So she leaves her hand there, her fingers splayed in his fur, listening to his quiet breathing. Slow. Peaceful. At some point she starts to drift.

She doesn't think she'll only sleep. She thinks she might sleep better than she has in a long time.

* * *

She sleeps. Deep. But once again the dream comes for her.

Not the fire. Not the blood. Not Daddy's head. Not fighting, not screaming or pain or the dark flash of her knife. She's in the meadow except she's not in the meadow, in the circle of stones except they're a circle of trees, naked and falling to her knees in the grass and when she raises her eyes Eostre is looking down at her with that cryptic little curve of her lips, haloed by stars far too numerous to hope to count and nearly too bright to look at.

 _Burning._ As if one tumbled out of the sky and into her. She's burning under her skin, in the fibers of her muscles and tubing of her veins and the pores of her bones, burning from the cunt outward. In so much heat she has no idea why she isn't a human bonfire, a mound of leaping flame.

 _Please._ The breeze sweeps through the branches and swirls around the grotto, making eddies of the light. It sighs like a lover and caresses her, teases her nipples into agonizingly tight buds, cools the slick wetness on the insides of her thighs. _Please, give me..._

She doesn't even know. She has no idea what to pray for. If she knew, she would beg and plead and grovel, press her face into the dirt, tear at her hair and gouge her skin with her nails and _bleed_ just to have it. What she wants. What she _needs._

She's so _empty,_ she needs to be _filled._

 _Yes, daughter?_

She fumbles between her legs but her fingers might as well not even fucking _exist_ because she feels nothing at all. Nothing but the breeze. No touch, no friction, nothing to thrust into herself even if it _would_ benowhere near enough. She claws at the ground and rocks back and forth, whimpering. No more pain in her side. _Fuck,_ if only that, it would be so much easier. She could handle that. It's just pain. She's suffered plenty in her time. She's well acquainted with it already.

 _This,_ however.

 _Make it stop. Oh my God, please make it... Just make it STOP, I can't..._

A quiet laugh. Amused. So Eostre is a _bitch._ Good to know. Then again, that's exactly what Daryl called her. _Daughter, I'm not sure why you expect_ me _to be able to do anything._

Beth folds, drops back onto her heels with her legs spread so wide her hamstrings burn. She's hungry, _starving,_ her whole body, her mouth watering, cunt dripping into the grass like rain. And this bitch is finding the whole thing _funny._

 _You DID THIS to me!_

 _And what's_ this? _What did I supposedly do?_ Eostre cocks her head and Beth could rise up and rip that fucking marble head right off that elegant marble neck. This is a dream. She could do it if she really wanted to. She could do any goddamn thing. _But that's not what you really want, is it, magden?_

 _Daughter, look at yourself. Do you even know who you are?_

She's Beth. She's Beth Greene. Hugging herself, her clit throbbing like a stubbed thumb, her tits swollen little handfuls and her nipples crying for fingers or lips or a tongue or _anything,_ but this is an easy question to answer. She's Beth Greene, sole survivor and heir, orphan, runaway, crazy girl, lost girl. Dead girl who refuses to lie down and die. Apparently the sluttiest virgin who ever did live.

 _A beast's mistress._

She _can't,_ she writhes and wails, she can't, and he's been _enslaved_ by her and there's no way to undo it, and she's been pulled in so far and so deep and she has no idea what else might be waiting down there for her, and she just can't. She can't. The universe doesn't make sense anymore, she's seeing monsters in the shadows and ghosts in the machines and dragons in the sky, she's walking through dead halls and between worlds, and she just absolutely fucking _cannot._

 _Well, sure as hell not with an attitude like that._

She jerks her head up, bares her teeth and snarls. _Fuck you. Smug bitch, fuck you, FUCK YOU._

That's it. She's had it. She's past her last remaining fuck to give. She's done. She wrenches herself free from the hold of the ground and the stroking fingers of the grass and leaps to her feet, rushes forward with the night wind singing wild around her. He's not the only beast. There's one in her too.

And it's going to feed.

* * *

 _It's going to._ But Eostre is fighting her - not standing there rooted to her marble base but coming to meet her, pushing back, grappling. Her hands are strong, stronger than their delicate carvings would indicate, and sure, she's a _goddess_ , but within the bounds of the dream Beth reels back in surprise-

And the marble isn't cold. Heat. There's heat, a lot of it. From her? Reflected back? She flails, swinging her fists, her hands hooked into claws. A tight grip on her right wrist, another high on her left forearm. Holding her back, holding her down.

 _Beth. Beth, you- Girl, fuckin'_ stop, _you're alright._

She's _not._ She couldn't be any further from _alright._ She was before, when he was curled on her bed and she thought she could sleep, but not now. There's a tornado in her head, ripping trees out of the ground and flinging trucks and leveling entire towns, consuming and consuming and never satisfied.

She hasn't yet found that one tree, the uprooting of which would be such supreme satisfaction that the winds would instantly die.

That one. Over her, pinning her. Pinning her arms to the bed even as she throws vicious kicks upward. Clumsy kicks. In another second he has a knee on her thigh, pinning that too. Panting. So is she. She stares up, the last of the dream finally blowing away like stormclouds, and all she can see is the black outline of him, edges of texture. His ragged shirt. Curve of the muscle of his bare upper arm. His hard cheekbone, the cut slashed down his jaw. The rest of him is lost in the shadows of the room.

She knows this is not what he meant to do.

"Daryl," she breathes.

"You're alright," he repeats, almost in a gasp. How long has he been fighting her? What has he heard? Seen? What does he know? "Was a dream."

"I know it was a dream."

"Calm the fuck down, then."

She doesn't want to.

Before, when he was a wolf, it all vanished. Cooled. It had anyway; her own weariness and pain had banked it down. But though she should be in agony right now, struggling like she has been, there's no pain at all. Only a humming burn that isn't much unlike the burn eating its way through the rest of her, like a brushfire in the midst of a summer drought.

She needs rain.

Asking him to stay was either a very bad idea, or one of the best ideas she's ever had.

"I'm gonna let you go," he murmurs. His voice is trembling a little and she's sure he's just realized what's going on, how he's holding her, and when he turns his head slightly and she catches the flare in his nostrils she knows he can smell her. The wet of her pussy, ravenous. _Drooling_ for him, only a thin worn stretch of fabric between it and however he wants to touch her there. She's arching under him, other leg falling wide and her loose shirt rucked up around her belly; none of this is under her control anymore, except it is and she made a decision and she doesn't believe there's any going back now.

If he wants. If he takes what she's offering.

"Don't." She swallows, licks her lips. She could lean up and lick his. "I don't want you to."

"Beth." Tight thread of panic; she can't miss it, and it extends from him and winds around her. If he _doesn't_ want it. She's _telling_ him. What she just said sounded for all the world like a command.

 _Within reason, you can do whatever you want with him._

She could. She could probably use him on herself like a toy.

 _Fuck, no._ Not that. Not like that.

"If you want it." She sighs and arches again. Her First Time, not in the big soft wedding-night bed she used to imagine but a small mattress in a shitty apartment, a man twice her age who isn't even really a man. She almost laughs. This is what her life has become. There's nothing strange about it, not for what it is. "If you want me."

He doesn't answer. She can feel how rigid he's become, arms shaking, how the quality of his breathing has changed. More shallow. Almost voiced. Not really so distant from a moan. His heat is blasting her skin, and as she does it - Christ, she _leans up_ to him, she's lost her fucking mind - she can smell him again. That blood. That smoke. His leather. Sweat.

Under it all, deep and musky. Wolf and more than wolf.

She's never smelled this on him before.

"Beth," he whispers again, his hold so tight that she wonders if he'll leave bruises, and when she seals her mouth over his, he shudders so sudden and so violently that for a split second she's sure he's going to pull away, jerk backward and ask her what the fuck she's _doing,_ tell her to cut it the fuck _out._

But he doesn't. And when she nudges his salty lips apart with her tongue he shudders again and a breathy moan slips out of him.

She's kissed someone before. Of course she has. She remembers her first one, fourteen - not Jimmy but just some boy from her third period history class, so cliché yet again, under the bleachers among paper cups and empty bags of chips while people stomped and roared above them and the football team charged down the field under blinding Friday night lights. Him all awkward - her too, painfully so - his lips wet and his tongue lurching its way into her mouth. He tasted like hot dogs and cherry popsicle syrup, and when he tried to get his hand under her shirt she shoved him away.

It wasn't good. It was yet another thing she had all these ideas about, about how it would be, and those ideas ended up being totally wrong.

And this is awkward too. He's so _stiff_ , like he's afraid to move, _terrified_ , but as she enters his mouth - giving his tongue a coaxing stroke with her own, he moans again and opens wider to her, lips pressing harder against hers. He's still holding her down - she's guessing he's forgotten that he even is - and she likes that. Likes it a fuck of a lot, under him this way. Heat from her wrists pulsing down to her pussy, and her clit is throbbing like her side used to be back when her side was a thing that mattered. She squirms, canting her hips upward as she sucks at his bottom lip, looking for friction. Pressure. _Anything._

She finds his leg. And it's not enough but it's _something,_ and she whimpers, rolls against it and breathes a little _oh god_ as the webwork of nerves around her clit lights up like a Christmas tree.

"Please," she whispers against his mouth, and he licks at her lips and releases her wrists all at once, cupping her face and angling her head up to him. Still clumsy, like this is unfamiliar to him, but it's so good, it's what she _wanted,_ and she works her hips into a slow grind, sure she must be soaking a wet spot through her panties and into his pants.

She should be in so much pain, and all she feels is pleasure thundering through her veins.

"Please what?"

He's not teasing. He's genuinely asking. Her head falls back, neck pulled into a curve, and she almost sobs with need.

"Make- Make me come. _Fuck,_ Daryl, I want... I need to come, please, _Jesus,_ just make me _come_."

He's stiffening again, still trembling, and when she stares up at him the light from the window catches his eyes - and she would swear to whatever god that he really is frightened.

But he lowers himself - almost falls - to her side, and she feels the weight of his thick, heavy hand on the plane of her stomach.

Not _fuck me._ Even though she wants that so bad she's almost literally going insane, jittering inside her skull and her ribcage and the column of her spine. No. _Make me come._

Maybe the fucking can come later.

He's hesitant, hand unmoving, hot breath against her ear and the corner of her jaw sending goosebumps all down her throat to her shoulders. She wriggles, impatient - and then she realizes she doesn't have to wait for him. _She_ can do it, what she does when he's _not_ here - and maybe he might even like that.

Maybe he'd like to watch.

She slides her hand down past his and under the elastic of her panties, through the damp curls of her pubic hair and over her mound, and when her fingertips graze her clit she really does sob. And he hauls in a ragged gasp and she feels him twitch against her, and out of the corner of her eye she sees him lifting himself on one elbow and knows that yes – _yes_ \- he's watching.

The light from the window is catching her. Not well, but it is. She lifts herself and circles, presses, and the sticky sound when she toys with her slick lips almost drowns out his groan. Suddenly his own hips roll and she can feel him, a hard bulge straining against his fly, and she sucks in air. Feels almost _elated,_ light like a star pounding deep in her belly.

He wants it. Her. He does.

But his hand hasn't moved and he's still trembling, wide-eyed, and under the thick haze of her own arousal she's starting to get an inkling of something. Something utterly ridiculous, but that never stopped anything from being true.

" _Daryl,_ " she hisses, and then she's wriggling, fumbling at her waistband, hooking her thumbs under it and yanking down. It catches around her ankle and she kicks, sends them sailing onto the floor, and then she's lifting her legs again, opening them, hand plunging between them and spreading herself as she works her clit in wide, careless circles.

"I don't-" he croaks, his attention locked on her bobbing knuckles, and that inkling solidifies a little further. He doesn't get it. She has to make him get it. She reaches for him with her free hand, gropes and takes hold, drags him the rest of the way down and jams his fingers against her sopping lips.

And he releases a helpless whine and turns his head, buries his face in the crook of her neck.

His fingers feel like they look: Big. Thick. Rough and calloused. Like she's imagined them so many times now, stroking her and thrusting into her, working her until she's screaming. She grips his wrist and rocks against him, jaw clenched-

He still isn't moving.

The sound that tears free from her throat is harsh, almost angry. Almost a growl. "Daryl, I fucking _need you._ "

And the words stumble out of him and launch that inkling into full-blown certainty.

"Beth, I- I don't-" His own half-muffled sound is choked with anxiety, frustration, sharp at the edges. Like he wants to turn it inward and cut himself. His face is like a glowing iron against her throat, and when his lips move she already knows what he's going to say. "I don't know what to- how you want it."

 _Oh._

"You haven't," she murmurs, everything slammed to a halt, and the words hang in the air. She's turned her head enough to see his face – his head ducked, eyes squeezed shut, and his mouth a thin, tense line; he looks as if he'd like to tunnel into the mattress and disappear.

He hasn't. Hasn't done this. Her mind keeps circling it, stunned by the very _possibility_ let alone the apparent fact. He hasn't done this.

Maybe hasn't done _anything._

Suddenly it's all different.

She doesn't release his wrist, doesn't let him go. But without pausing to consider how best to handle this she rolls toward him - this man so much older than her and so much more at home in the surreal semi-nightmare her world has melted into - and she lifts his head with her free hand, combs her fingers into his hair and arches her mouth over his and licks into him. Slower now, gentler, _deeper,_ and he sighs something that might be her name and she feels him falling into it, loosening, his wide palm curved over her mound.

"It's not complicated." Whispered against his jaw, kissing him there. Trailing wet kisses down to his throat as he groans through his teeth. _She_ never has, never; the closest to this Jimmy ever came was a hand between her legs over her jeans, kneading her until she was whimpering and squirming - but nothing else happened.

She didn't even get a hand on him.

She's never done this but no, it's not complicated. She can show him.

He rocks into her again, grinding against her hip, and like everything else it's clumsy but it doesn't have to be graceful to feel good, and he does. If the sounds he's making now are any indication, he does. She smiles against his adam's apple, scruff tickling her cheek, and starts to move his fingers for him.

"There." Taking his middle and ring finger, nestling them into the cleft at the apex of her lips, finding the nub of her clit and pressing until her breath catches into a quiet little sound. "Feel that? Right there, like this..." Uneven circle - not very much like she'd do it herself but then he does it without her guidance and she drops her head back, eyelids fluttering.

He'll pick it up quick.

"Like that." She clutches at his hand, almost threading their fingers. "God, Daryl, like that, just... That's good, that's... _Ah_."

He's panting again. Wordless. She manages to pry her eyes open, look up at him; he's staring at what he's doing, completely fascinated, _rapt,_ and her breath hitches again, twists into a knot that has nothing to do with how he's manipulating her clit.

She never imagined anyone would look at her like this.

"You can..." She doesn't know how to say it. He's made her bold, _brazen,_ but now that she's trying to tell him, the words are drying up. There's just hands, bodies, soaking in his heat, and she realizes all at once that she's forgotten something.

She's forgotten what he is.

Right now it doesn't matter. Because all she wants is this.

"You can," she repeats, so soft and so low, and she takes his fingers again and guides them lower, parts her lips for him, nudges his fingertip against her. "I want you to."

"Beth." Her name, something broken in the syllable - something almost like fear again. Once more he's trembling, and she's about to tell him that he doesn't have to, not if he doesn't want to, not even if she's about to scream and claw at the walls with how much she needs _anything_ inside her, when he pushes his quivering finger slowly into her and she falls back with a cry blooming in her chest.

Not like her own fingers. Not like anything. So big, so _thick,_ only one, pressing against her walls, sliding rough and hesitant and halting when she squeezes him. Little gasp - anxiety again, and she won't have that; she rolls to meet him as she tugs him deeper.

"Like that." The words are fragmented, emerging from her in hoarse pieces. "Oh, Daryl... I want that, _yeah.._."

She doesn't tell him this part. She pulls his hand back, pushes it in, and he whines, the sound so strangely broken at the edges and not far from a sob. His own hips locked in place a while ago – his entire frame - and he's simply this long, hot weight all up and down her side, breathing fast and hard, and even as she whispers _fuck me with it_ he's already doing exactly that.

Like everything else, clumsy. But perfect. Fucking _perfect,_ the wet squelch as he pumps his finger into her, her own hand slipping free of his as her fingers return to her clit. She can barely manage anything under his working palm but she's been on the edge for the last however many minutes, maybe a lot longer than that, and it's not going to take much. She's moving with him, with herself, a stuttering rhythm as she keens _faster faster oh my God_ and he obliges, moaning in time with her _ah-ah-ah_ like he can feel it too, still braced up on one elbow with his eyes wide and his lips parted and wet.

"You're gonna make me come." Tight, the words tumbling out of her; he needs to know. He needs to know that he's doing it, what she asked for. He's doing it right. "You're gonna... Oh- Daryl, don't stop don't stop dontstop oh _fuck..._ "

She's never stopped herself from making noise, not here, and she doesn't now. She wrenches her whole body upward and wails, spasming, head rolling, half aware of his awed _holy fucking SHIT, Beth_ as it shakes her like she's in the jaws of a dog.

A wolf.

She falls and he's there to catch her, finger still thrusting in and out of her - slowing. He apparently knows this much, knows she'll want to rest. Her hand drops limply to the bed and she stares up at the ceiling, the light strange and bone-pale on the tiles, aftershocks shuddering over her in waves and her side finally sending sharp little twinges through her like sparks.

Him. He's gazing down at her. At his hand. At her again. His expression is...

His eyes. Glowing. It's all she can see.

"Beth."

Her hand feels like it's encased in lead but she raises it, ghosts her fingertips down his face. They're wet with her own juices, and they leave shining smears on his cheek.

"That's so good," she breathes, and once more a shiver takes him and seems to wash through him, his finger going still inside her. It's something about how she _says_ it, what she says; dimly she remembers the porch, touching his hand and thanking him, this same shivering. The look on his face.

Commingled heat and cold flood her, realization following behind.

She told him she was happy with him. Not in so many words, but that's what she did. And that's what it did to him.

So she can do it again, she decides with all the certainty of a dream. She can give him something, this man whose pleasure suddenly appears to crest with the degree to which he's pleased her. She carefully draws his hand away from her, and as his gaze locks onto his fingers, how they glisten and how shimmering spidersilk-strands of her wet stretch when he parts them, she arranges herself to face him and drops her hand between them.

Cups him.

The way he goes rigid is nothing like how he's been before; he collapses into it, every muscle vibrating, breath choked. She looks up, sees his throat working, tendons standing out and jaw set. Eyes half closed. His sticky hand is clenched at his side. And this isn't what she was hoping for, this isn't what she wanted to give him, and she freezes too, her hand still over him - so _hard,_ the outline of his length in the curve of her palm, the way he's throbbing with all the desperation she was feeling, she's never in her life touched someone's cock and for a moment she's _lost_ \- trying to process. Understand why.

She knows fear when she sees it. This, too, isn't like before. She's pretty sure that was the fear of unfamiliarity, of what she now thinks might have been the fear of getting it all wrong.

This is just _fear_.

"You're so good," she says again. Maybe if she just tells him, reassures him. "Daryl, that was amazin', it felt..." She presses an open-mouthed kiss to his jaw and his shaking only intensifies. "God, you made me come so _hard_ , I want-"

She's kneading him now, slowly, her breath roughening when she feels him twitch and jump under her hand. He's whimpering, sounding vaguely pained, noise bleeding out of him in a steady stream. She's not sure how to make it good for him either but she doesn't imagine he's much more complicated than she is. She's gone this far. She's wild. What the fuck _is_ virginity, anyway.

"I wanna make you come, Daryl. I wanna-"

" _Stop._ "

He snaps his hand closed around her wrist, yanks her away and jerks back, his voice and his breathing strained. Strangled. For a few seconds she blinks at him, stunned; this still all feels like a total dream with a dream's logic, and this might be a new peak of surreality.

He doesn't want her to.

"I'm sorry." If only she knew what _for._ Her stomach twists; suddenly it's not right, none of this is right, and her side is starting to ramp up its complaining. If it was a dream, she's awake and it's fading. "Daryl... What did I-"

"Nothin'," he mutters, nearly a growl. He uncurls his hand and stares down at it; it's glistening but drying now, the juices of her orgasm filmed and cracking over the joints of his fingers. His eyes are unreadable.

She can't simply let it go. He can't possibly expect that. She half rises on one arm, peering at him, swallowing into a suddenly dry throat. "It's not nothin'."

"Can you just leave it?" It could be sharp but it's not. It's as soft as anything else he's said, and the pleading in it is undisguised. He refuses to look at her. "Just leave it be."

She could push. She could make him. Instead she pulls back further, her gut knotted, staring at him. Fuck, she wishes he would _look at her_ , except for how she kind of doesn't.

Isn't sure she wants to see what's really there.

"Alright." Voice soft as his, and if he's not trying to disguise his pleading, she won't try to disguise her unhappiness. She was floating on the warm, fuzzy cloud of her orgasm; now she's returned to simply being tired. Hurting. Worse. This isn't how it was supposed to be.

Then again, none of this was supposed to happen at all.

He still doesn't look at her. Doesn't speak. Doesn't even move, partially curled against the wall, chin tucked down and arms drawn in close to his chest. Folded up. As if he's trying to make himself small, without changing. Something no stage of his transformation could do for him.

As if he's trying to make himself disappear.

Once more she thinks about trying to pry it out of him. Commanding him to explain himself. Begging him. Apologizing over and over until he caves and tells her what happened, what she did wrong. What _is_ wrong.

Why he's like this.

Instead she hauls the covers back up and does like him - curls in on herself, makes herself small, and tries to ignore the insistent thrum of the pain in her side. She watches him for a while, until her eyes are too heavy to prop open and the dark gathers her back in.

She leaves it be.

She also doesn't dream again.


	15. failed ambitions held up on tridents

**Chapter 15: failed ambitions held up on tridents**

She wakes up in an empty bed.

At first she's not sure why this is unexpected. There are things she almost has - many of which feel as if they're probably related to why her side is whining and prodding her with sharp little jabs of pain above a long, steady throb - and then there's a lot that's just gone. Not gone beyond recall, she's fairly certain of that, but lying on her side and blinking into the indirect daylight, it's all just blank space. Black boxes full of the same pain worrying at her now.

Empty bed.

He's gone.

She shifts her legs under the covers and - aha - there's a clue regarding the memories she can't quite reach: she's not wearing panties. Naked from the waist down.

His fingers. That comes back to her all in a rush, heat that twists deep inside her - like he had been, thick and moving fast, fucking her over the edge from which she's always had to launch under her own power. On her swollen clit, slick with her. Soaking the sheet beneath her, moaning his name - him _there_ with her. Taking his hand, showing him how.

Because he didn't know. Presumably the basics, he would almost have to - but not the details. Not how to make it good for her.

Not how to please her.

And he shivered when he knew he had. Like coming from that alone.

She stares at the fake wood-paneled wall, at the place where she now remembers he was lying, her breath tangled at the base of her throat. That really happened. All of it. And somehow - it's crazy but then again what _isn't_ these days - the rest of it is easy to accept. It strains her belief not at all. The ghost world and the ghost barn, ghost house, what they found on the hill and the fight after - yes, it's all returning, sweeping over her in wave after wave of mental playback. Everything else they went through together sits comfortably in her mind like any other fact. Okay. It was real. They got some things out of it, lost some others. Moving on to whatever's next, even if she doesn't have the remotest clue what that might be.

Then there's what happened in this bed. What she begged him to do. What he did.

And now he's not here.

Suddenly and uncomfortably mobile, she shoves herself up with both hands, wincing when her side protests. He brought painkillers with him. Those and antibiotics. She should take both. There are a lot of things she should do. But he appears to be gone, and for some reason that's the most-

She turns and he's there, standing at the window, fingers curled around one of the bars and smoking. The very mirror image of his first morning here, except he's dressed.

Also some other specific differences.

And while she can only see half of his face - and even that, as usual, is partially obscured by the shaggy fall of his dark hair - what's visible is a lot more than pensive. Last night he was scared, actually _scared,_ and she still doesn't know why. He doesn't seem that way anymore, she doesn't think, but his mouth is tense, his jaw too, and whereas before he wasn't looking at her because he simply wasn't looking at her, now he's keeping his attention locked on the window with what feels to her like particularly focused intent.

Her gut twists. She wanted it to be good. To the extent she ever imagined it might really happen at all, _anything_ like it, she always sort of assumed that it would be good, and for more than just her. He would want it. He would do things _with_ her, not only stuff _to_ her. He would be eager for it. He would take charge of it. He would want that too.

Then again, she also sort of assumed he would have done it before. A lot more and a lot further than she has. Which wouldn't be especially difficult.

Yet another thing that keeps happening. Sooner or later she'll take the hint and start expecting it.

She glances down; without meaning to she's curled both hands around the edge of the sheet, clenched them into fists, her knuckles bloodless. Every bone in her body feels unnaturally close to her skin.

"Daryl?"

He exhales a stream of smoke and grunts, and that's all.

He made her come. He held her down and kissed her and made her come and she's absolutely _certain_ he liked it. And she wants to stumble to her feet and stomp across the floor to him, grab him by the shoulders and _shake him_ until he caves and tells her what the fuck is _up with him._

Instead she just sits there, blinking at him. Useless.

He breaks the silence for her. It might be kindness; it's difficult to tell. She still can't really see him, and his tone is flat in a way that manages to be entirely neutral. "How're you feelin'?"

"I hurt." Because that's true in a number of different ways, and contained within two words it's very convenient. She tugs up the hem of her shirt; she's half expecting to see the bandages spotted with blood but they're pristine.

He must have done a good job.

He grunts again and nods at the table by the bed, on which she sees he's put the antibiotics and Percocet. And water. A glass of water that she knows for a fact wasn't there when she lay down.

She looks at it, and the knot of her breath thickens. Aches a little.

So she uncaps the Percocet and swallows one, and if it won't solve all her problems, it will at least address a few of them. Then she watches him for a few more minutes, studying the wash of gray morning light in which he's standing, what it's doing to him, how it's exacerbating his contrasts. His black and pale, all the shadows that seem to follow him around even when he's standing in full sunlight. She noticed it yesterday, but it hadn't seemed to matter.

It does now. Because at this moment he feels completely out of her reach.

Fuck's sake, she'd really like to know when this thing became about her relationship problems. She'd really like to know when this became something she could categorize as a _relationship._

He sure as shit doesn't appear to be thinking about it that way.

Finally the pointlessness of staying in bed is too intense to bear, and she shoves the covers back and swings her legs free - actually not so much _swings_ as gingerly slides - and levers herself up. The flex of her abdominal muscles is uncomfortable but not much more than that, but she doesn't immediately try any further movement, standing with her eyes half closed and feeling the unevenly painted wood beneath her feet, the chips and small bubbles. Her knees and the muscles of her thighs, her gently spinning head.

The last thing fades quickly. Just got up too fast - that's what she chooses to conclude.

Not like she can do a whole lot right now anyway, except lie the hell back down.

He still hasn't budged. She regards him in silence for a few more seconds, sighs and turns from him and makes her way back over to the dresser. Her shirt hangs on her frame, long enough to reach her upper thighs, but all at once she feels more naked than she wants to be. She barely glances down as she steps over her discarded panties; somehow seeing them solidifies things in a way she just straight-up doesn't want to deal with.

But fuck him, he has to _sometime._

She drags out a pair of worn black leggings, fumbles them on. They're thin and loose - she doesn't think the elastic is going so much as she's just skinnier than she was when she bought them - but they're better than nothing and she doesn't anticipate leaving the apartment in the near future. Over to the kitchenette, fridge open - pulpy orange juice. She dislikes pulp but it was all they had.

She pulls it out and uncaps it, tips it back and swallows a couple of rounds. Pulp be damned.

She gets the distinct sense that he's watching her without looking at her at all. She can feel the pressure of his gaze - not so much an actual gaze as the full of his attention. There is no way in this or any other world that this whole deal isn't going to be painfully awkward now, and if she hadn't been so hysterically fucking _horny_ she might have figured that out before it was too late.

Isn't that part of why she was trying _not_ to?

She's an idiot.

He hooks his fingers under the sash and raises the window higher, flicks the stub of his cigarette out, closes it. "I should go." He pauses a beat; his tone is still low and grating and maddeningly flat. "I got some stuff to look into."

"We should talk. About last night."

She doesn't completely mean to say it, but she's not even slightly interested in taking it back. Since she got up she's been transitioning from hurt and confused to hurt and irritated, and she's well on her way to hurt and _angry,_ and when she gets there - if she does - she thinks she might say some things she probably shouldn't articulate.

For both their sakes.

"No."

Just... Just that. _No._ He turns away from the window, head down, moves to the couch and clearly his jacket. And she's closer, and again without meaning to she darts forward - quicker than she would have expected to be able to - and snatches it up, pulls away. Which feels beyond childish, but at this point she's willing to make some concessions.

Not like she hasn't already.

"We _should._ "

He jerks his head over his shoulder, and she can see one eye through his hair - heavy-lidded. Sullen. Something behind it, like a shadow moving behind a screen, something she's seen more than once now.

She's getting good at recognizing his fear.

 _Why._

"You tellin' me to?"

Four words. He hurls them at her in that same low, flat voice, hurls them like stones and they bruise through her ears and into her chest, and in that single sullen eye it's piercingly obvious that he knows exactly what he's doing. There's a meanness in it now, something narrow and almost calculating, and she understands.

She underestimated him.

He's aware of how she feels about it. He remembers what she's already said, and he's been perceptive enough to catch a lot more and bright enough to work it out. She has power here. A lot of it. On paper she has all of it.

And that's exactly what he can kick back in her face.

 _You can force me to do something. And you'll have to live with knowing that you did._

"Daryl," she whispers. Bloodless as the knuckles of her clenched fist. She shouldn't feel like crying, and abruptly she does, and she hates it and she hates him the thinnest, tiniest bit for doing it to her. She knows something now, and she can't unknow it.

He can be cruel.

 _Oh my God, WHY._

"Told you to leave it be."

"So you're just gonna pretend it didn't happen." She doesn't think she's relieved to hear her own voice steady, cool, as if he hasn't slapped her in the face. Perhaps she should be, but she's established that her and _should_ aren't getting along this morning. She sets the juice carton down on the counter and crosses her arms. "Just like that."

He merely looks at her, silent. He's still not fully facing her. It occurs to her that he hasn't since yesterday - which feels like it was weeks ago, for all she can connect it to what's happening now.

"I _liked_ it." Now there's desperation, a tight, hard edge of it, and she's fine with it being there. Sure, she'll hand him some more ammunition. Her arms unfold and drop to her sides, hands spread, a few yards short of pleading - which might still be a little further than she's prepared to go. "It _felt good,_ Daryl. It felt so good, I don't... What the fuck is the _problem?_ "

 _Why wouldn't you let me?_

For another moment he gazes at her in silence, unmoving, and it stretches out. Becomes trackless. She loses hold of how long it really is. She'll wait. It's that or throw him out.

Or go ahead and - yes - _tell him to._

Then it's like he breaks. It's subtle, so subtle she would very likely have missed it if she didn't know what to watch for: a dip in his chin, duck of the head, his eyes closed. His hands hanging at his sides, forefinger and thumb working against each other in tiny, rapid circles.

She has all the power. And she hates that too.

"I just don't want to," he breathes. "Make me do it or fuckin' leave me alone."

 _Make me do it._ And she realizes with chilly creeping horror that she's not positive what specifically he's referring to.

She thought she made it clear, before. That he didn't have to. That he could stop. He didn't seem like he _wanted_ to stop. She's very sure about this; she might not trust all of herself right now but her memory is one of the few things she retains, and _he wanted to do it._

Didn't he?

"I'm not gonna make you do anythin'," she says softly, and the words take all her air with them and leave her deflated, hollow. "I just don't... I don't understand."

"You don't have to." He hesitates, then crosses to her, reaches down, and plucks his jacket out of her loose grip. She makes no effort to hang onto it, and this time she's the one who isn't looking at him.

And he isn't moving. He's just standing there, his jacket in his hands, and when she lifts her gaze she can finally see him, his face and both eyes and everything churning behind it all, everything he's trying so hard not to show, and it takes every last atom of strength in her to keep from lunging forward, wrapping her arms around his waist and holding tight.

She doesn't know why he's scared, what he's scared of. She doesn't know what's wrong. And no, she doesn't have to know any of that. All she has to know is that she's fucking sick of fear, sick to literal _death_ of it, and seeing it in him over this is almost more than she can bear.

Some wedding bed. Some _First Time._ Because yes. In many ways it was that.

Could have been.

"Just leave it be," he repeats, and - almost imperceptibly - his voice is quavering. "It don't matter."

What the hell else is she supposed to do? Argue?

 _It does matter._

She leans against the counter and watches him go. Shrugging on the jacket, his receding back, the groan of the door's hinges and the click as it shuts. The empty space he leaves behind, the space he was occupying. She stares at it all soaked in colorless light, and breathes, and wonders for the hundredth time now where the fuck everything went so wrong.

This was a good thing. That's something she _does_ understand. A good thing - a _weird_ thing, a crazy thing, a thing that's plenty scary in its own right, but she was with him and she felt safe, for the first time in a lifetime, and even if it didn't make any sense it was still good.

If she could go back, to before last night. If she could undo it. She absolutely would. No orgasm is worth this. And she's going to have to sort it out, somehow. Any way she can.

Because this isn't over.

She has work later; she remembers it like the last fucking straw and it breaks her back. She turns and leans against the grease-stained counter, over it, and squeezes her eyes shut until her stomach begins to slowly unknot itself.

She has work later. And then she has whatever's coming after.


	16. least you don't have to play along

**Chapter 16: least you don't have to play along**

In the end - about four hours later - she does indeed wander off to work.

Because what other options are there? She could call out; it would be inconvenient as hell for Axel because there's only one other employee - a supremely unreliable twenty-something college dropout improbably named Stalin - and really she probably _should_ , given her side, but the Percocet is keeping the pain down to a low buzz, sullen as Daryl's eyes, and she doesn't want to stay home. Try to sleep. Fail. Think way too much. Mix Percocet and whiskey and still fail to sleep, and the fact is that sleep is about as unappealing right now as a hard pinch in her wounded side.

She might dream again.

At work she might be distracted, at least some of the time. There will be people, and it's likely that even though she's not working late-night the people will be weird - so much weirder than a week ago, incidentally - and that might not be comfortable, but it should at least hold her attention and steer it away from where she doesn't want it.

Walking the few blocks to the gas station is another stupid idea, because by the time she gets there she's wincing and thanking Whatever for the bottle of painkillers she thought to toss into her pocket, so she's maintaining a streak. It's still gray, cool edging into cold, autumnal and not in the pumpkin-spice-latte sense, and outside the apartment, back here with the dirty pavement rising to meet the soles of her boots, the whole farm feels like it was merely a memory into which she stumbled, something she only thought was real until she stumbled out again. This world is solid. Weird, getting weirder, but solid and tangible and mostly navigable. If it wasn't for the pain, she might believe none of it happened at all.

But there _is_ the pain.

So there's everything else.

She doesn't look at anyone as she passes them, keeping her head down and her gaze locked on the sidewalk in front of her, faded crosswalks and intersections, more sidewalk after. She counts the wider cracks, marks her progress that way, and the distance between her front door and the door of the tiny station interior melts into a patchy blur. She pushes it open, bell jangling above her, and Axel looks up from behind the counter, mustache twitching as he scans her.

His brow pulls into a frown. Her stomach sinks a bit. She probably looks worse than she thought. She didn't give herself more than a cursory examination in the mirror. It didn't seem like it mattered. But a week ago she came in here looking like hell and he very definitely noticed, and this might not be something she wants to make into a habit unless she wants to come up with some more convincing lies.

"Beth, you... Hey, you okay?"

She nods, gives him an almost Daryl-esque grunt, moves to the back and - teeth gritted - works her coat awkwardly down her arms. She's _not_ okay and it has to be pretty obvious, but Axel tends to be all right when it comes to backing off. But when she turns he's still looking at her, leaning against the counter, and his frown hasn't gone anywhere. If anything it's intensified.

"Are you in some kinda trouble?" He pauses, adds, "you can tell me," and two things come to her: first, that he genuinely wants to know, and second, that he genuinely wants to know because he genuinely would help her if he could. Yeah, maybe also distantly hope she might be grateful in some particular ways, but not with any real _expectation_ of anything.

He's an okay guy. He is.

Except for Daryl, he might be just about the closest thing she has in the world to a friend.

She is _not_ going to tear up now. Absolutely not. That would probably be one of the worst things she could possibly do.

 _My world is literally coming apart at the seams and don't even get me started on my sex life. As of last night I_ have _one._

 _That's the part you shouldn't get me started on._

"I'm alright," she says, and she manages a smile that doesn't feel too fake. There's even some actual sincerity behind it. "Swear. Just haven't been sleepin' enough."

"Okay." But doubtful. She's not selling it well enough. He's not buying. "You _can_ tell me, though. Y'know. If you ever are."

She nods again. And that's about as far as she feels prepared to go.

Fortunately that's as far as she _needs_ to go. Three bored teenagers apparently spent the small hours throwing bottles of Bud Light Lime against the side of the building and only stopped and ran when an equally bored cop showed up. Beth gets some gloves and a bucket and broom and goes to deal with it.

So yes, that's a distraction. On paper, anyway. A bucketful of broken glass probably counts.

Would count for more if it actually worked.

* * *

Axel leaves, casting glances over his shoulder as he walks out the door and trying to not be too obvious about it. She does her best to ignore him. Better to. It's winding on toward a deeper gray evening and she just wants to sit and wait for people to deal with and lose the rest of her brain to yet another level of Candy Crush. She's been stuck on the current one for three days. A problem she actually feels ready to tackle.

She's not going to look at any of the porn. That seems like a really, really bad idea.

But what she ends up doing is unsheathing her knife - of course she didn't leave the apartment without it, she doesn't think she's ever going to do that again - and turning it over and over in her hands, watching the harsh lighting sheen off the blade. No trace of blood anywhere on it; Daryl was clearly careful with it, but also it's always cleaned up well. Easily.

Oddly so. Like it actively repels blood.

She runs a thumbnail across the lines - words, she now knows.

 _Eac thes Cweal afnan adeadian._

His voice. Soft. Smooth. Bizarrely elegant in the formation of the phonemes. She runs the pad of her thumb up the edge of the blade. His voice, so close to her ear. Warm breath. Holding her.

Finger buried in her cunt far past the knob of his second knuckle, fucking her into thrashing wreckage.

 _It's not complicated._

It is. She groans and closes her eyes.

Then two girls not much older than her come in, howling with laughter at something on one of their phones, and the knife goes back into its sheath and she forgets about it for a while.

But after they're gone, out it comes again. Her thumbnail traces, traces, and after a while her lips start to form the words, tongue moving silently in her mouth and cradling the shapes of the unvoiced sounds.

It goes on like that for a time. There's a steady evening stream that tapers off. Full dark now, which always feels a bit strange; two of the four walls of the place are half glass, and with the hard light and the dark outside, somehow - if it gets late enough - she always ends up feeling like she's floating through a void in a bright little capsule, some kind of cosmic refugee from a planet-wide disaster. The last of her kind. It's fanciful, and it's also morbid, and maybe it's the combination of both of those things that always ends up bringing her back to them.

Closer to home than she could explain.

No one for a while. It's getting on to nine. Stalin is due to come in at nine-thirty, which means he'll probably walk in the door more like ten. She's drifting again, thumb making its swooping passes over the knife, when the bell over the door draws her attention vaguely toward it.

A woman who's not a woman is standing there, looking around and sniffing.

She's short. Around Beth's height. She's dressed in a very old coat and a very old pair of sagging pants, both a grimy brown. The sleeves of the coat are long, almost long enough to swallow her hands, but her fingers extend past their bottoms - or rather, her nails do. Not painted acrylic. Real. Clearly real, because they're yellowed and slightly curled and split in places. She raises a hand to her waist in an aimless kind of way, and Beth sees - notes with distant fascination - that three of them are crusted with what can't really be anything other than blood.

Her skin is patchy gray and shiny. Hairless. What hair she does have is mousy brown, thinning. It looks like it might come out in clumps if tugged with any real force. Her eyes are black - completely. Pupil, iris, sclera. They gleam unevenly like spilled tar.

She looks at Beth and draws her lips back, revealing two rows of jagged, red-stained shark teeth.

Beth stares at her, motionless. She should be scared. She should be terrified. She should be screaming. Maybe once she would have been all of those things. Now she simply stares and grips the knife, and she can _feel_ the woman-thing's gaze flick to it. She can feel a kind of drawing back, a cringe, though the woman doesn't move.

Then she does. She walks - glides - to the counter, her strides surreally long and surreally smooth, her focus now locked on Beth's face and her teeth bared in a wide grin.

There's the knife. She has the knife. She's killed once. More than once. Fuck, if she has to, she'll kill a monster right here, cut her throat over the counter and shower her blood onto candy bars and gum, somehow clean it all up before Stalin arrives and go home like nothing happened.

Apparently that's just her life now.

The woman-thing stops. Looks at her. Beth looks back, unwavering.

The woman-thing looks over Beth's shoulder and raises one bone-spindly hand, points with a single ragged claw, and croaks, "Virginia Slims."

 _Oh._

Beth blinks at her. The woman-thing points again, now with a slight air of impatience, as her other hand fishes in the pocket of her coat and produces a wad of crumpled bills.

At this point Beth knows the wall behind her by touch. She doesn't have to turn. She doesn't. Finds the pack without taking her eyes off the woman-thing, rings it up, accepts the bills, and hands over change, all without shifting her gaze. All without letting go of the knife.

The woman-thing takes the pack of cigarettes and the change, seeming unperturbed now, and turns to move toward the door. But halfway there she pauses and tosses a glare over her shoulder. "Rude," she grates, like an offended crow.

Beth cocks her head. It's pointless to be freaked out at this stage. More than anything she's just bewildered. " _'scuse_ me?"

"Rude," the woman-thing repeats, and gestures at the knife. "You just _assume_. You just-"

The door jangles and the woman-thing jerks back to face it as Daryl closes the distance between them to less than three inches, looming, his own lips peeled back from his lengthening teeth and a deep growl rumbling in his chest.

Once again Beth doesn't see a man. He just isn't there anymore. All wolf, muzzle wrinkled and hackles raised, ears lying flat.

The woman-thing gapes at him open-mouthed, rust-colored fangs protruding, then hisses sharply and cringes away, slides to the door and vanishes into the dark.

Daryl watches her go. Swings his gaze back to Beth. Doesn't move.

She swallows. This isn't how she expected to be wrapping up her evening.

Neither of them says anything. Then, abruptly, she's had it. She's just completely _had_ it. It's thing after thing with him, thing after thing _without_ him, and now _this,_ when all she wanted to do - assuming it was even possible, which it's not - was come to work and not think about him for a while. That he's here at all feels like some kind of jab at her. Like he's walked in specifically to make her life even more complicated. Like he's making it some kind of _mission._

She slams the knife down on the countertop, so hard she wonders - wonders, not _cares_ \- if she's cracked it. She points to the door. "What the _fuck_ was that?"

Daryl glances over his shoulder, as if the thing in question might still be in view. There's nothing. "You saw her? Like... not normal?"

"She bought cigarettes. She had teeth. Yeah, I saw her."

He bites down on his bottom lip, looking at her and then rapidly away. He's radiating discomfort. _Good._ "Vampire."

She doesn't even pause to process. She's pretty much given up on that. Werewolves are real, so why the fuck _not_. Anyway, in those books, don't they always go together? "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Alright." She leans over the counter. She's mad. She was getting there earlier and now she's arrived, and she's going to settle in, because he deserves it. Or that's what she's telling herself, because it's easier to be angry with an object to be it _at._ "What the hell do you want?"

"I saw her come in." Again he looks at her; again he looks away. His discomfort is clearly intensifying, and he lifts a hand and gnaws at the edge of his thumb as he moves forward. "Figured-"

She does some very quick, very sudden math. She didn't tell him where she worked. He shouldn't know. He _saw the thing come in._ Every muscle in her winds up, tendons standing out in the backs of her hands. "Were you _watchin'_ me?"

"Think I shouldn't be? After that?" But he doesn't sound entirely sure of himself, and that only winds her up tighter.

"Was she gonna hurt me?"

"Maybe. She could've." Rapid-fire, almost snapping; he _is_ looking at her now - glaring, shoulders hunched, and it's the kind of defensiveness someone adopts when they aren't sure they can really defend much at all. But under her anger, she knows - _knows -_ that he's telling the truth. Knows and remembers. Knows and remembers and isn't surprised by this, isn't sure why she wasn't assuming he might be doing this all along.

 _Long as I'm breathin', I'll be by your side._

"She didn't." She slaps the knife. "I'm not some _helpless little girl,_ Daryl."

"You're hurt. Shouldn't even _be_ here. I told you to stay put."

"Fuck you, you're not my _dad."_

Silence slams back down like her hand on the countertop, and once more they're both just staring at each other. Without meaning to, she was practically yelling at him, but that's not why it's descended like this and that's not why he suddenly looks paler, sharper contrast against his essential darkness.

He hasn't said anything about his age. She hasn't said anything about his age. It just hasn't felt as if it really mattered. It _still_ doesn't, not as far as she's concerned, because the world went insane a long time ago, and one thing Fucked Up Brain Jimmy had entirely correct is that all the rules have sailed out the window. But it just ripped out of her, embarrassingly petulant - Christ, she really _did_ sound like a teenager, a _bratty_ one - and now it's hanging there in the few feet between them and she can't take it back.

What they did together. What he did to her. She looks at him now and it's like his head is a window. If only what's churning around inside was at all comprehensible to her. If only it wasn't lost in those shadows he carries with him everywhere he goes.

She clears her throat and looks down at her hands. It has to be her. He doesn't appear as if he's ready to speak yet. "Thanks," she mutters.

And she does mean it. Because he's been watching her, yes. At least some of the time.

Keeping her safe.

"Yeah," he says - also mutters - and gnaws at his thumb again, looking at the door as if he might make a break for it. But instead, after another moment, he lets his hand fall and finally raises his eyes to her, and there's a flash of something she _does_ completely understand.

"Sorry," he says quietly, and her breath hits the back of her throat and stops there. "About this mornin'. About... About last night."

"It's okay," she whispers. It's not, it's really _not,_ and she still kind of wants to leap across the counter and shake him until he explains what the fuck _happened_ , but he's gazing at her with naked pleading in his expression - exposed in a way he never was in that first gray light when he refused to even face her.

He just wants her to let it go.

"I'm sorry too, I shouldn't have-"

"I don't wanna talk about it." The _talk_ twists, snags on something, and for a split second he sounds almost miserable. "Alright? It's fine, it's... Just... Right now. I don't wanna talk about it."

 _Please,_ please _can we not talk about it._

Okay.

"Yeah," she says - sighs. Whatever. It's fine, like he says. Because standing here, looking at him standing _there,_ unnaturally solid and dark and real in the overheads, all she really wants...

All she wants is to get on his bike, wrap her arms around him, and ride. All she wants is to go into his den with him, sit and share a smoke in the quiet of the empty building. All she wants to do is walk through the night-lit wastelands with him trotting as a wolf at her side.

The rest of it... It's a shitty deal.

She doesn't want to be alone anymore.

"Alright," he murmurs, and closes the rest of the distance to the counter, scanning the place as he does. Watchful. He's mapping, she can see. Rapidly evaluating the space and what he might be able to do inside it. What he might have to do.

He's probably always done this and she just never noticed it until now.

"What time you get off work?"

She blinks at him, nonplussed; then she thumbs her phone. "I'm... In about ten minutes." She gives him a tiny, wan smile. "The guy is usually late, so."

"You got anywhere you have to be after that?"

"I was just gonna go home." She's tired, suddenly more than she knew. Hurting. The painkillers are wearing off. But he's speaking briskly now. With intent. Something is up. "Why?"

"Said I was gonna look into some stuff." His mouth twists. "I can't do it myself. I don't know enough. We're gonna have to talk to someone else."

 _Someone else._ Someone he's clearly not pleased about. And she knows, even as she opens her mouth to ask, who it is and why. "Who do we have to talk to?"

He grunts, bites at his thumb. Looks away. He's scowling now, and she's sure she'll need the painkillers.

"We gotta go see Shane."


	17. there's something inside you

**Chapter 17: there's something inside you, it's hard to explain**

Shane lives in one of the more suburban neighborhoods that makes up the north edge of the city. It's what Beth supposes would be called Nice, if by no means opulent: mostly full of single family homes in decent shape, shady streets, and very quiet for close to ten-thirty on a Friday night. Holding on as Daryl takes them down one street and then another, she realizes that it's distinctly possible that she's lost a lot of perspective on what Nice actually was for her once, as well as opulent. And not in very much time. Something about where she's made her living space has been working its way into her head, and maybe returning to the farm was entering a different world in more ways than one.

Not feeling at home there. Here. Anywhere. Selling cigarettes to vampires like nothing she's ever seen in any movie or on any TV show is sure as hell not helping.

But she holds onto Daryl, does what she's done before and lays her head against his back and listens to the steady thump of his heart, and she feels a little closer to that. Even now. Even not talking about It.

Safe. Maybe more than ever.

And whatever they need to talk to Shane about... Yes, he seemed like kind of a legendary prick. But he also didn't seem like he might actually be dangerous. Rick appeared to trust him. And what she's discovering now - long after she suspects it became the case - is that she trusts Rick enough to trust his evaluation of other people.

Shane is _cyne._ Apparently that means something. Something serious. If what she saw that night is any indication, being part of a pack goes way beyond being a member of a group.

If _Daryl_ thinks he can help them, it probably means something as well.

She's still in some pain, but it's keeping to its distant buzz, like a swarm of grumpy bees with blunt stings, and it's continuing to be manageable. She watches the neighborhood slide by almost dreamily - more mild, pleasant painkiller haze - and when Daryl pulls over next to a very nondescript house with a wide lawn and windows lit behind lowered blinds, it's a bit like waking up. The bike falls silent and she lifts her head, blinking, slowly releasing Daryl as he swings his leg over.

She's staring at the house. Touch at her shoulder and she jumps, jerks her head around. He's close and caught in an orange pool of streetlight, peering at her, and there's something soft in his expression, the set of his mouth, his eyes.

"Y'doin' alright?"

She nods, starts to get off, and without being asked he closed his hand over her elbow, helps her. Not very much. Not enough to be truly obnoxious. And she's not even inclined to shake him away. It's good, a tiny bit of leaning. Knowing that she can.

Whatever happened, it doesn't seem like it wrecked this, so that's something.

He releases her, steps back, and she stands just fine on her own, glances toward the house and back at him. Somehow, after seeing his den, it's not exactly what she expected. Though there's no reason to assume any of the others live the way he does. She's already gotten the pretty conclusive sense that Daryl is an exception to more than one rule in more than one way.

Even so.

"He lives here?"

"Gotta live somewhere." He steps past her, heading to the front walk, looking back over his shoulder as she starts to follow. "We usually try to, y'know. Blend in."

She nods again. She remembers Rick. Uniform, gun. He probably didn't have those things for no reason.

A werewolf cop. She almost smiles. There's a lot here that's kind of funny when regarded from certain angles.

Up the front walk to an equally nondescript concrete front patio - wooden bench, a couple of pots occupied by plants that aren't doing so well. There's something weirdly indicative about them in a way she can sense but not quite articulate, and she gazes at them - slightly dreamy again - in the sharp illumination of the motion-activated porch light as Daryl bangs twice on the door.

There's a bell. She doesn't think he ignored it by accident.

For a moment, nothing. Then, as Daryl's raising his fist to pound again, there's the rattle of a lock and the door swings open to reveal a deeply annoyed Shane in sweatpants and a tank top, hair slightly tousled - not exactly as if he was in bed but as if he was on his way there.

Beth doesn't yet have a good handle on these creatures' circadian rhythms. There doesn't appear to be a tremendous amount of consistency. There was last night, when he curled up on her bed, but the fact is that she's not sure _when_ Daryl sleeps.

There was the bedroll, but maybe he doesn't sleep at all. Not the way she does.

Anyway, there's Shane, and he looks from Daryl to her and his already deep scowl deepens further. "What?"

Daryl sighs. He probably doesn't want to say what she knows is coming. He probably resents it a fuck of a lot.

Is possibly tying himself into irritated internal knots. And regardless of his own new commitment to this, he's doing it for her.

So she gets there before him.

"I need your help."

Shane flicks his gaze back to her, and beneath the scowl there's a flash of what she's sure is surprise, and another flash of what she's also sure is confusion. "Huh?"

"You heard her." She wonders if he's grateful. She can't tell, not by his tone. "We got somewhere, but it's fuckin' _weird_ and there's some shit I don't know. Shit that don't make sense."

Shane stares at both of them, the confusion clearer - and a fresh variety of annoyance following close behind. This obviously isn't something he expected from either of them and isn't something he welcomes - she remembers how he looked at her. How he talked about her. _To_ her. The scorn. Not far at all from contempt, though she suspects that was more about Daryl than her.

But she also remembers that he talked. Told her some things. Useful things.

And when it comes down to it, she doesn't have much pride left. Not when it comes to this.

"Please," she says quietly, stepping forward. "Please, Shane, I... I don't know where else to go now. _Daryl_ doesn't know where else to go." She bites her lip, digs deep; she might not have much pride, but she's not out of guts. For whatever they're worth. "Rick said you're the teacher. That you do that. If you know..."

She falls silent. There isn't much else to say. She's guessing saying more would be a bad strategy anyway. Shane's annoyance appears to have faded a bit, and his eyes are narrowed thoughtfully.

Daryl is looking at her. Not directly, not in any way anyone would spot unless they studied him closely. But he is. She can feel it.

Heavy. Warm.

Finally Shane huffs out a breath, rakes a hand through his hair, steps aside and holds the door open.

"Alright. Fine." He twitches his chin at the house's interior. "Get the hell in here."

* * *

The inside of the house is as nondescript as the outside, and clearly the home of a man who lives alone and doesn't have a lot in the way of guests. It's not all that messy - some dishes on a coffee table that needs wiping down, a rug that needs vacuuming, a pile of papers and a laptop on what was probably intended to function as a dining table - not ugly, but it's very _bland,_ and only now, scanning the place, does Beth realize how much of Daryl is in his den. So many tiny ways, tiny things - it's _him_ in there, fundamentally _his_ , even with so little.

Like even the slightly messy parts have been arranged with care. Attention to detail.

In here, there's not much in the way of detail of any kind. It's weird.

The more she's around Shane, the more she thinks _Shane_ is kind of weird. And maybe not totally in the ways everything and everyone else is.

Shane leads them into the living room featuring said coffee table, waves a hand at a slightly worn leather sofa, drops down into a chair opposite and leans forward, elbows braced on his knees and hands dangling. Beth glances at Daryl; he's glancing at her, basically shrugging with his eyes as he sinks down onto the sofa and adopts a similar pose. Beth follows and doesn't adopt anything of the kind.

Shane gestures again, a _come on_ flick of his hand which actually isn't as impatient as she might have thought it would be. "So tell me."

Daryl glances at her again. Question this time, and she can read it perfectly well. She gives him a nod, and as she does there's another one of those flashes of awareness - what might be going on with that. Asking permission. Giving it.

As with his den, lots of tiny ways. And that's not all.

She's suddenly certain that whatever is doing this to him, it's getting stronger.

Daryl is already talking, laying out the trip, the farm, the Scead, the secret shrine on the hill, and the attack, all in just enough detail that Beth guesses will be useful while still leaving certain things out - holding her. The blood in the house.

What happened after.

Of course he wouldn't want to talk about the last. But the others... He has no real reason to hide them - except to keep her privacy. Her confidence.

She watches him as he rolls to a halt, his soft, rough voice falling quiet, and she feels fierce gratitude like a flaring coal in her chest.

 _Safe._

Shane is silent for a few moments after Daryl finishes, hands now clasped between his knees and his head down, brow furrowed. He takes a huge breath, lets it out, and the odd '22' medallion around his neck swings against his broad chest.

"Alright," he says finally, raises his head, holds out a hand. "Lemme see the knife. If you got somethin' to wrap it in. I'll get a towel otherwise."

Beth just looks at him. It takes her a few seconds to process. Not because it's a strange request - it's not, and given what they're doing here it's actually completely reasonable - but because before this... It's just been Daryl. She gave it to Daryl when he asked. And her only hesitation came when she remembered how it burned him. Now Shane is asking for it, and she doesn't want to give it to him.

It's not that she doesn't trust him. She simply doesn't want to hand it over at all.

Daryl goes into his pocket for his bandanna, pull it out, lays it in two layers over his hand and presents her with it, eyes expectant.

She has to. If she wants to know, she has to. She lowers her hand to her belt, her hip - and she has to make herself, has to _push_ \- pulls the knife from its health and lays it on the bandanna, biting at her lip as Daryl wraps up the handle and holds it out for Shane to take.

Shane does. Gingerly. He curls his hand around the handle and turns it, sets the blade flashing in the light - even low as the light in question is, its source a standing lamp a few feet away. The knife drawing in the light. Amplifying it. Gently hypnotizing.

"Jesus," Shane murmurs, and lapses into silence for another couple of moments. He lifts the knife closer, eyes narrowed, mouthing words. Beth doesn't have to hear them to know what they are. The same words she was mouthing in the gas station.

 _Eac thes Cweal afnan adeadian._

He lowers the knife, looks up at her. "And you don't know where this actually came from."

"The fire," she says - but even as she does, and impatience sharpens his gaze, she knows she doesn't believe it. Not completely.

Or it's not that simple. There's something else to it. There's something else to _everything_ now, that shadow-world which is getting clearer and clearer all the time. Pulling her in.

"No," she amends. "No, I guess I don't."

Shane flicks his eyes to Daryl. "You know what it is."

Daryl nods. "Kinda hard to miss."

"It's the Reord a Bealu, for sure," Shane continues. "But this wouldn't be Hathsta. None of us could even _grip_ the damn thing."

More questions. More fucking _questions_. "So what _is_ it?"

"I dunno." He shakes his head. The impatience has almost entirely disappeared, replaced by mulling confusion. "I've never seen anything like it." He frowns again, rubs his free hand down his face - and stops.

Freezes.

"Fuckin' hell," he whispers, staring down at the blade. "That's not... Fuckin' _hell._ "

She just about launches herself off the sofa - though she doesn't move at all - Daryl fading into the background. People just flat-out refuse to level with her about anything, at least not without a struggle; she could snatch up the knife and hold it to Shane's throat until he _tells her._ " _What?_ "

Shane drops the knife onto the coffee table and shoves himself to his feet. "I gotta check somethin'."

"Think you could fuckin' clue me in while you do?" She's on her feet too, a silent Daryl behind her, almost trotting after Shane as he strides into the dining room, slides hard into the chair in front of the table and the laptop, brings it out of sleep and begins rapidly clicking through folders bearing titles she can't quite read. He stops on one, opens a PDF and starts to scroll through it. It's a scan, she sees, of something that looks old. Very old. Script that is decidedly not English, or any other language she's ever seen.

Except on the blade. And even here, it's subtly different. She couldn't say how.

"There." Shane halts and leans forward, lips moving slightly as his eyes travel down the page. Another quick scroll and he stops and points at the screen without a word.

She stares. Not even in shock; simply uncomprehending. She can think of ways in which there might even be totally reasonable explanations for it. But if it's that simple, if it's that reasonable, she doubts Shane would look like this.

There, roughly sketched but perfectly recognizable, is her knife.

She glances back at Daryl - sees his eyes wide. At Shane - the same. "For God's. Sake." She slaps a hand down on the table, sending some of the papers fluttering to the floor. "Will _one of you_ tell me what the hell I'm lookin' at."

"This?" Shane turns to her, still pointing. "This isn't Hathsta. This is _Drya._ " And before she can follow that with yet another demand for an explanation, he gives her a very strange little smile, and the words die on her tongue.

"Girl, I have no idea how, but you got yourself a witch's blade."

* * *

Shock makes everyone a bit more congenial, albeit in a distant kind of way. Shane gets them both beer. As he's doing so, Beth gets a better look at one of the piles of paper on the table; it's a collection of photocopied police reports.

His name is on them.

Huh. And Rick is a cop. Both, then. Maybe. And here he is getting _her_ a beer. Yet another thing she almost - _almost_ \- smiles at.

All those rules that no longer apply.

She turns back to Daryl, who's standing very close, looking over her shoulder. At the screen. At her. At everything. His face is difficult to read, but she leans back against the edge of the table and looks up at him and tries to do so anyway.

She could reach forward a few inches and lay her hand against his chest. That close.

"Witch?"

He shifts from one foot to the other; she can read him well enough now to see that, once again, he's deeply uncomfortable. There are just any number of reasons why he could be that way. He ducks his head and his hair drops across his face, obscures his eyes. "He's probably gonna tell you about it."

"Why can't you tell me now?"

"Why can't you wait for him to?"

Her mouth tightens. It's like he's difficult when there's not even any obvious reason for him to be so. Even a hint of one. "Daryl..."

"It's a long story. Okay?" He steps back and turns away, his gaze sliding across the floor - past a discarded pair of boots by the doorway and a baseball bat leaning in a corner - and the bare off-white walls, the hall beyond, anything but her. "He probably knows it better than me. Can tell it better, anyhow. You ain't gonna die of waitin'."

Again, it comes to her that she could command him to. Again, she shoves it away so violently it almost shakes her.

She looks back at the laptop's screen, at the sketch of her own damn knife, and waits in silence for Shane to return.

He does a couple of minutes later, a six pack of Heineken dangling from his fingers, and jerks his chin toward the living room.

There, they all take the same seats, and beer is distributed. Beth has never been much of a fan of beer in general, but right now any variety of drink seems indicated, and she isn't hesitant about the size of the swallow she takes. She ignores their eyes on her - particularly Daryl's - and lowers the can, muffling a belch with one hand. Concession to manners when really she doesn't much care. Not at the moment.

"What are the Drya?"

Shane glances at Daryl, looks back at her. "Like I said. Witches."

"Yeah, I got that part." She gestures impatiently with the can. "I need more."

Shane sighs and looks down at his own beer for a few seconds, then raises his head and regards her with a slight tilt in it that makes her think of Rick. "Powerful. Much more powerful magic than any of ours. They were around pretty much as long as we were. From around the same place, near as we can figure. They worshipped the same goddess as us, kept a lot of the same ways, 'cept they made Mona and Mere - moon and sun - equal to Eostre. Which, hey. Not a huge issue. Definitely not worth gettin' into a thing over.

"We never had a whole lot to do with them, honestly. It was fine. We each mostly kept to ourselves. We were friendly enough when we crossed paths. Helped each other out now and then, backed each other up in fights. But other than that..." He shrugs. "We walked the same world. That was about the extent of it."

 _Was._ Beth's fingers tighten around the can. "You're talkin' like it didn't stay that way."

"Yeah. 'cause it didn't." Shane pauses, takes another hefty swallow of beer, and sighs again. Beside her, Daryl is a big silent shadow, leaning over his knees and watching both of them.

She keeps waiting for him to say something and it keeps not happening.

"About three hundred years ago there was a war. Between them and us. Big one. Went on for years. Devastated both sides."

Beth blinks at him. This isn't what she expected. Then again, somehow it doesn't surprise her all that much. "Why?"

"That's the thing. No knows. The basic story is that one of the biggest-name eal at the time got into a _situation_ with one of 'em, it got awkward and embarrassin', she threatened to fuck up his life, he threatened to fuck up hers, she threw a spell at him that went haywire, he lost his mind and made up some kinda story convinced everyone else to go along with him." Shane shakes his head. "So everyone else lost their minds too, 'cause otherwise that must have been some _hell_ of a convincing story. Either way, a lot of the records of that time got lost. No one's alive who remembers it. Our bocere - historians - they've been tryin' to find out anything they can for a long damn time and comin' up empty. A lot of it don't make no sense at all."

He's quiet for another brief few moments, and this time Beth doesn't interject. She's considering. Turning things over. Three hundred years. Something she heard about that. Something someone said the night she met the rest of the pack.

"Fact is, no one has any real any idea anymore. There's the story, but it's just a fuckin' story. A lot of our stories are true, and they're backed up by somethin'. This one..." He rolls a shoulder and falls silent again.

"But..." Beth frowns. Her can is still heavy in her hands; she hasn't touched it since that first swallow. She hadn't noticed. "What about them? The Drya? Don't they have records too? Can anyone ask them?"

Another quick exchange of glances between Shane and Daryl - too quick for her to parse. When Shane looks at her again he's smiling thinly, and it's a deeply grim smile. "Well, see, that's a little tough."

"How come?"

"'cause," Shane says - simple, flat. "We killed 'em all."


	18. there's a curse comes with a kiss

**Chapter 18: there's a curse comes with a kiss**

Back on the bike, she lays her head between Daryl's shoulders and closes her eyes again, sinks into the throb in her side and tries not to think about anything at all.

A losing battle from the word go, but she seems to have a thing for those.

Here are the things she's trying to shove out of conscious focus, as Daryl growls them through silent streets and onto better-traveled ones, weaving through sparse traffic and heading south. Here are the things that tug at her hair like the wind is doing, like she normally enjoys and now is only making her more tired, more pained, more lost in dark waters that just get deeper and darker all the time.

Even if there's still the fact - on more than one level - of his hand in hers.

Shane told them - more than a little brusquely, he seemed to have moved back into being impatient with their very presence - that he would look further into it, there's nothing more for them to do now, go home, don't go back to the farm, pretty much stay put until they hear from him. Whatever. There was nevertheless a genuine intention to help. She's almost sure of it. She'll take that with whatever dickishness comes along for the ride. Now she's feeling the alcohol and the painkillers mingling into something decidedly soporific and she just wants to go home. Sleep. Forget about everything for a while.

Forget about Daryl's warm, solid weight next to her. His rough fingers, equally warm, stroking across her skin. There's always so much _heat_ in him, as if his core is a spinning heart of molten iron. Creating its own magnetism. Dragging her in.

She stiffens and sighs, passing lights flickering through her head like higher notes dancing across a steady bass drone. _Stop._

But then she doesn't want to go home after all. And really, all other things being equal, she doesn't see why she should have to.

She tightens her arms around him, gives his jacket a tug, and he leans his head back as she tips hers up and yells, "You got anythin' to drink back at your place?"

He doesn't even answer her. He makes a sharp turn, heading more directly south through sparser and sparser collections of houses, stretches of empty scrubby wasteland dotted with ruined and graffitied walls and half collapsed fences, and a shiver rolls through her. They're moving into his territory. On second thought this might be yet another bad idea. On the other hand...

On the other hand she just wants to _be_ with him, and she can't keep ignoring that no matter what else she does or doesn't do, and she can go home later and give herself what she needs with her own damn fingers and him in her mind. Up until now it's been enough. Not ideal, but enough. It still can be.

She draws a breath, draws it deep, now watching the landscape roll by - and in the distance, the downtown towers. She holds it and combs through the exhaust and gasoline, the faint smell of decay, and she finds him at the heart of it. Sweat. Leather. Smoke.

Wolf.

She can hold him inside her, hold on in the midst of all of this insanity, and she might not drown.

* * *

He doesn't ask her for any further explanation as he pulls to a stop inside the building and swings his leg over, turns back to her; he also doesn't wait for her to register any need for assistance before he's helping her, steadying hand on her elbow like before, and like before she doesn't brush him off. His hand - and again, without meaning or wanting to, she's thinking about how she knows that hand better than and in ways she never expected to.

Not outside of fantasies she would rather lie down in front of a bus than let him know about.

Yet here they are. Not Talking About It.

She can be over it. She just wants a drink. Even if - she's reasonably certain - if it's strong enough and she has enough of it, it has a better than average chance of laying her out completely. He might mind if she passes out on his bedroll, but somehow, even if he makes a show of it, she doesn't think so.

Anyway, apparently he can just tie her to the bike and haul her back to her apartment.

He doesn't ask her for an explanation. But as she makes her way up the stairs ahead of him, his voice drifts up to her from the shadows, gravelly and faintly amused.

"How many pills you take, girl?"

"Not enough," she shoots over her shoulder, and while she's grimacing by the time she reaches the top, her side pulling itself into a deep throb, she's amused too. The whole situation is absurd, and therefore amusing. At least she's in a place where she can simply accept the absurdity and keep going.

Not that another drink wouldn't probably help.

The hallway is lost in darkness, but it's not as if she has to make any turns, and as she moves down it she extends her left hand and trails her fingertips along the pitted plaster of the wall, feeling them slip and rise as they pass over doorways. She still hasn't been in any of these other rooms, hasn't seen what they contain, and she glances back at him, though he's nothing more than a presence in the near blackness behind her.

Looming and close.

"What's in those?"

"Offices?" He grunts. "Nothin' much. Got cleaned out pretty good when this place got left. Couple desks. File cabinet or two."

"Why'd you take the one at the end?"

"Only one with a window that ain't broken." He reaches past her and pushes the door open. He doesn't lock it, she thinks. He probably doesn't need to. Didn't he say this place was protected? Doesn't it feel like it is? "Wasn't gonna sleep in no goddamn cell."

A rasping little click and flame leaps into existence. He steps through the door ahead of her, lighter high, and as she follows him he crouches in front of his small collection of candles and begins to light them. Candles. Not a lantern. Firelight and a window.

She watches him, the slope of his back, a glimpse of the firelight in question playing over his features. "You wanted the light?"

It's an obvious question with an obvious answer, and she half expects him to give her gentle shit for it, but instead he just nods and pushes to his feet, faces her and flicks the lighter closed. "Used to bein' outside."

She muses on that, once again in a dreamy kind of way, as he moves to his stove and food stores, reaches behind one of the gallons of water and produces a mason jar half full of something clear. Something that itself looks like water, and which she's sure isn't anything of the kind.

He returns to her, carrying it, as she sinks down onto his bedroll with a soft groan and stretches out her legs, shrugging off her jacket. She lays a hand over her side and cocks her head, not fighting the smile that tugs at the corner of her mouth.

"What's that?" Though she thinks she probably knows anyway.

"Moonshine." He lowers himself to his knees in front of her, but instead of handing her the jar he sets it down and reaches for her shoulder. She looks from his hand to the jar to his face, bemused, and gives him an arched brow.

"What're you doin'?"

"Should change that dressing."

 _Oh._ She shakes her head. "I can do that myself."

"No, you can't. Not without it hurtin' worse. Best if I do." He leans down to the foot of the bedroll and fumbles through the blankets there for the metal box that she recalls serves as his first aid kit. "Take your shirt off and lie on your other side."

He freezes at the same instant she does, looks up at her with his eyes flashing mirrors. It's hard to see his face clearly from where he is, but she doesn't need to; she knows. They both do, both really _heard_ what he said at the same moment, and just because they aren't talking about certain things, that doesn't mean they're gone.

Things have a way of gaining weight and density the more you don't talk about them. She knows this too.

But surely they can both be goddamn adults about it.

"Alright," she says quietly, and reaches up and back with one hand, carefully pulls her shirt forward over her head. The air is cool, cooler than she thought, and she takes a shallow breath as it slides across her bare skin, hugging her middle with a single arm and allowing her attention to refocus on him as he roots through the box, removes what he needs.

There's a pointedness in the way he's not looking at her.

But he has to. She lies down under the shifting shadow of his body and raises her arm when he prods at it, closing her eyes and trying very hard to ignore how exposed she feels. Still in her bra, sure, but she's not going to kid herself about this; when he saw her this way before, that might as well have been a year removed, because there's all the difference in the world seeing someone almost half naked when you've made them come all the fuck over your fingers.

She feels exposed beneath him, yes. But it's not unpleasant.

That's the problem.

He's silent as he lifts the tape away from her skin and takes the thick gauze with it, brushing away the dried leaves of the yarrow - less fragrant than it was, but still savory, like the smell of a kitchen-based memory. He's exquisitely careful, exquisitely gentle as he exposes the neat rows of stitches, fingers gliding over the lines of the slash, and his breath is warm on her skin as he bends to examine it.

Strangely, she doesn't want to watch him. But she does. She does, and he knows she is, his hand hovering close to the underside of her breast as he begins to spread a cloudy, pungently medicinal salve over the wound. The salve intensifies the cool in the air but his hands are radiating heat the way they always do, and the subtle conflict of temperatures makes her want to shiver.

Not the only thing that does.

"Are you gonna use the yarrow again?"

"Don't need to. You ain't bleedin'." He clears his throat and starts to unwind more gauze. "Lookin' pretty good, actually." He lifts his head and gives her a quick smile - wide by his standards, wider than she thinks she's yet seen. "Seems like you heal quick too."

She huffs a laugh - not as uncomfortable as it might have been, and she wonders if there's something fast-acting in the salve - but otherwise doesn't answer, and as he's taping the last bit of gauze in place she's already pushing herself up, reaching for her shirt. She sees him scooting back and folding up the rest of the gauze, putting it away, and then she turns her face to the side as she tugs the shirt back on. Somehow, right now, it's hard to meet his gaze. Even if it's lost in the shadow of his hair, sheen of reflected green-gold the only thing to mark it at all.

When she faces him he's holding out the open jar. She looks at it, the candlelight wavering through it, and flicks her eyes up to his. She has no idea what specifically it is that's brought it on, but an immensity of loss has slammed her in the chest from an angle she never could have expected, and her throat has gone tight.

He blinks, thinly veiled apprehension passing across his face. "What?"

"Nothin'. Just." She swallows. She can; that's good. "My dad always said bad moonshine could make you go blind."

The apprehension vanishes, and the corner of his mouth twitches slightly. "Think I'd be givin' you bad moonshine?"

"Guess not." She manages a laugh, and it's not something she has to try for. It's the twitch of his mouth, the way the salve does indeed seem to be smothering the pain back into dull unimportance, the lingering smoothness of the Percocet. Everything has been so difficult the last couple of days, but now suddenly it's all easing, and she takes the jar and doesn't hesitate. She tips it back, takes a swallow- and almost gags.

"That's the most disgusting thing I ever tasted."

Daryl rolls a shoulder and reaches for the jar, but she shakes her head and takes another swallow. Because it's disgusting but fuck it, that's why.

"Second round's better."

And it is.

"Yeah, well." He plucks the jar out of her hand, another quick smile stretching his mouth - wry. "Watch it. I don't wanna have to haul your sloppy ass home."

She leans back on one hand. The moonshine is settling inside her like a bed of coals, and it's nice. Worth the taste, she'd say. And isn't this what she wanted? Just this. Sitting in his den with him, just _being._ Between this and her empty closet of an apartment, she doesn't think the choice is a difficult one. "You my chaperone, Mr... What _is_ your last name, anyway?"

He pauses in the act of lifting the jar. "Huh?"

"Your last name. Unless you ain't got one." She tips her head against her shoulder, soaking up the pleasure of her own smile. "Do you?"

He's quiet for a brief moment, just looking at her. Then he completes the jar's upward journey, and his swallow is, if anything, more substantial than either of hers. "Dixon."

"Mr. Dixon," she finishes, and the glare he shoots her is frankly enjoyable. "I like that."

"Don't make me regret tellin' you."

"I won't if you gimme some more." She holds out her hand and flutters her fingers in a beckoning motion. "C'mon."

He sighs, leans forward. "Go easy."

"Yes, Mr. Dixon." She actually grins as she takes the jar, raises it - then pauses. Because maybe she just really is getting sort of drunk, but this whole thing is _better_ with every passing second, better and warmer and more comfortable, and in a more distant, more sober part of her mind, it's actually hurting her. Aching, with a kind of sweetness she fully comprehends. Because she's needed it. Hasn't she? Company. Just someone to talk to, who isn't Axel and isn't a creep, and isn't trying to _get_ something from her or judging her in private silence.

She's needed it for so long.

"Thank you," she says softly - reflexively - and she only remembers what those words have done to him when she sees him stiffen.

What he does with his shoulders then is far too awkward to be a proper shrug. "'s just a drink."

"No." He knows what she means. He knows but he's trying to brush it off. She doesn't want him to. It matters. It matters... And maybe she wants to see it. "For everythin'." She nods down at her side. "For this. For helpin' me. Thank you."

And it happens. Like she's seen. A deep shudder, subtle but all the way into his core, his eyes falling half closed as he draws in a breath. Once again his face is half thrown into shadow, but she can see enough of him. There's no mistaking this for anything other than what it is.

There's no mistaking this for anything but pleasure.

"Beth," he breathes, and she sets the jar down between her knees, studying him. She wants to understand. Needs to. She doesn't think she can keep up with this unless she does.

"It does somethin' to you when I say that," she murmurs. "Doesn't it?"

He ducks his head, hands loose in the cradle of his crossed legs. Then, slowly, he nods, and she's startled when he looks up, eyes bright. He's over a foot away from her but all at once she can feel it like he's bending over her again: his heat, the rush of his blood, pulsing just beneath his skin.

"Ain't just what you say."

"It's-"

"Doin' what you want. What you need." His teeth catch his lower lip and worry at it. It might be anxiety - she senses that it is, at least some - but there's more. A lot more, seething with complexity, more than probably even he can untangle. If this is pleasure, she wonders what...

If she touched him now. What she would feel.

"It's not just about rules for you. Is it? Not just _laws._ "

He shakes his head, takes a breath - and after a few seconds of obvious effort he manages to transform it into a string of words.

"I wanna make you happy." He worries at his lip again, and when she lowers her gaze she sees that his hands are worrying too, fingers rolling against each other in constant, rhythmic little waves. "I want... Wasn't there at first but it's gettin' stronger." He swallows. He's holding her gaze, eyes still flashing now and then when he alters the angle of his head just-so. "It's feelin' better."

She stares at him. She knew, knew without him having to say it. She saw it, and she knows what she saw. Once might not have been enough to solidify it for her, but after... It couldn't have been anything else. When he made her come, what mattered to him - what seemed to do more to him than anything else - was _making her come,_ and she has no idea how else to understand it, and she has no fucking idea what to do.

Except maybe not _that._ Not anymore. Not if this is how it's working.

"I don't want a slave, Daryl," she says softly, and the words are barely out before he's shaking his head, more insistently. Denial.

"Ain't like that. I _want_ to."

"But is it _you?_ " Five minutes ago it was easy. Now her throat is tightening all over again, her chest and her gut, and there's a tremble under her diaphragm that feels uncomfortably close to fear. "How do I know it's _you?_ "

"Who the fuck _else_ is it gonna be?" His voice is rising, sharpening, but she doesn't think it's anger. At least, not at her. "I _want_ it, I can't _stop_ wantin' it. When I do, when you say it and I _know,_ it's like... Nothin' feels like this. Nothin'." His hands are gripping each other now, twisting, and when he turns his head more fully into the lowering candlelight and she catches the same twisting in his mouth, something almost anguished, she finally understands what she's seeing.

He's scared.

"Is it always like this? For... For you? For all of you?"

"It's always more than rules. In the end. If it's like _this..._ I dunno. I dunno." He sighs and his head drops, his hands closing into fists. "Beth... It's not. It's _never_ been like this. Not for any of us. 'cause it's never been a human. Get it?"

She gets it. Yet another thing she understood before, at least in part, because it's self-evident when you think about it for more than five seconds. Sure, it might be the same. But it makes more sense for it to be different. For it to be new. For him to have no idea what to expect. For him to be feeling this now, for the first time, and be frightened.

And last night she touched him, got her hand on his cock and told him she wanted to turn what he did back on him, and he panicked.

"Just tell me one thing," she breathes, runs up against a wall in her head, and busts on through. Not knowing this is simply not an option. "If I told you to do somethin'... like, like last night. If I did. Say I did. And you didn't want to. Could you say no?"

He doesn't answer. He sits there, head lowered, fists clenched and every muscle in his shoulders practically vibrating like wound springs, and she waits and he doesn't answer. He's not the only one wound up: she can feel it inside her, twisting into a hectic spiral, shortening her breath and making her heart thud in her ears. If she. If. If she did _that_ to him. Even by accident.

If she's done it already.

She thinks she might honestly be about to scream when finally he raises his head and meets her eyes with his own. And what she sees there is broken open and helpless, and hurting.

Needing.

"I don't know if I wouldn't want to." He pauses, and it's a pause like a dropped stone. "I don't know if that would even be possible."

The pause was a dropped stone. This is an avalanche. She sits and she looks at him - _gapes_ \- and he looks back at her, and the sheer density of the need in his glowing eyes might be the source of that glow, the accretion disk of a young star. She doesn't even know how to guess what it's a need _for-_ unless it's just for what he said. A need to make her happy. To do what she says. If somehow this thing, this _Scyld_ , has fucking _brainwashed_ him, and he literally can't say no to her.

Literally doesn't _want_ to. Which might be the one thing, with her, that he doesn't want to do.

 _Fucking Christ._

Somehow she lands back on the one _other_ thing that won't leave her alone. The one thing that's been gnawing at her since it happened, and which she now simultaneously understands and isn't anywhere in the _vicinity_ of understanding. "You wanted to?"

He nods. Unhesitating. So apparently they're talking about this now. Okay. "I wanted to. I." He releases a long, shaking breath. "I liked it. Touchin' you like that. I liked it a lot."

And he'd. "You never did that before," she whispers, and it's not a question, and when she remembers the shame on his face when she said _you haven't_ it feels cruel to even say. But again without hesitation he nods, and he looks straight at her and he kicks her in the stomach.

"I never did nothin' before." His hands abruptly loosen. Go still. "I never kissed no one before."

" _Oh,_ " she whispers, and that's all. _Oh. Oh my sweet holy God._

That might be all she can ever do again.

Things happen, and you think you might not completely get what's going on, and it turns out you got precisely none of it. That you might as well have been in another universe for all of it you got. That universe feels like it's imploding inside her ribcage, and what its collapse forces out of her is a tiny little squeak of a word, one she's immediately and horribly embarrassed by.

" _How?_ "

The look he gives her is - for once - simple, and all exasperation. "What, you want my fuckin' life story?"

"No, I mean-" Scrambling. She's used to the idea that things can go south in a hurry, but this is a _plummet._ "I'm sorry, I wasn't... I was just surprised. I'm sorry."

The glare remains, though it's softening just a touch. Not that it was ever all that hard-edged. "Look, whatever. You just. You didn't." He glances away, to the side and over his shoulder at the candles. A few of them are guttering. "You didn't _make_ me do nothin'. That's all. If that's what's freakin' you out."

She coughs a laugh. This keeps being ridiculous and getting more ridiculous and finding more _ways_ to be ridiculous, and at a pace she has no prayer of keeping up with. Aside from trying to parse all the looping ins and outs of choice and free will in this situation, that should make her feel better. Should calm things down somewhat. And in part maybe it does. But in a host of other parts she looks at him and all over again she feels his fear, his body tight and shuddering under her hands, and she doesn't think she has anything _like_ a monopoly on _freaking out._

"If that's what _I'm._ " She breaks off and she thinks she might laugh again, but she doesn't. He's still gazing toward the candles - toward if not actually _at_ them - and the light is bleeding away as they begin to fizzle out. He's being slowly swallowed by the dark, and she doesn't want to let him go, even if this feels like more cruelty. They're _talking about it,_ so she's going to talk. "You wouldn't even let me touch you."

Okay, shit. She didn't mean it to come out like _that._

His head snaps around, and while she has no clear view of his expression, she can feel his eyes boring into her. Not human eyes, not now, because she's learned that - as with his body - they can shift back and forth completely on their own. He's looking at her with wolf eyes, and no, she's not afraid of him. She knows by now that she doesn't have to be. That's no longer something she doubts.

But she can't forget what he is.

She parts her lips as if she's planning to say something else, but she's not - she's devoid of any plan at this point, and no words come. And he doesn't seem to have any on offer.

He just stares at her.

She's nearly squirming. Now her hands are gripping each other, and she lowers her gaze to them for a few seconds; she's twisting at her own fingers so hard she hears them crack. It's not a minefield, being around him, but it seems to be like trying to navigate unfamiliar and uneven terrain mostly in the dark. Nothing is going to explode under her feet, but there's every possibility that she'll trip over something and sprain an ankle.

Except the tripping will hurt him too.

"I'm sorry," she breathes. That might be good. That might work, if she has to say something, and she feels like she does. And she _is_ sorry. Because in those last moments he had been _miserable,_ it was vivid as if illuminated by stage lights, and knowing what she does, she wonders if most of that misery hadn't come from the fact that he hadn't wanted to tell her no.

But he did. That's the thing. She's been afraid that he wouldn't be able to, but he did.

 _Stop._

He _could_ do it when it came to her. Wanted to. She remembers how he looked; he was _eager._ He fled only when it came to him.

She's ready to say it again when he half shrugs and angles his face away. Not a denial, not telling her to fuck off, so - and it's unwise, but there's the moonshine as both an excuse and a balm if nothing else - she presses.

"I just didn't-"

"I can't fuck you."

Another kick. A roundhouse. She blinks at him because it's basically all she can summon the strength to do, and he's _looking_ at her again, penetrating her with those wolf eyes, and when he says those four words it's there in her head, and real enough to cut her and so bright she's sure he must be able to look into her and _see_ it like a movie reel against the wall of her skull.

On her elbows and knees, spread wide, so wet. So hungry. Claws against her sides, teeth at her shoulder. Huge inside her, pounding her into the ground.

Soft fur on her skin.

 _I can't fuck you._

So that film has been screened in his head too. Or something not unlike it

She doesn't think she's ever been this naked in front of anyone.

"I can't," he repeats - very soft. She can't tell if that's regret in his voice or something else entirely. "Don't ask me why not, okay? I just can't. But we-" His voice slips into nothingness and he licks his lips, gaze bobbing down and up again - nervous. Not scared. Nervous, and the reasons are no doubt numerous and despairingly complex. But she supposes she doesn't need to know them.

What she's certain is coming will be more than enough to fill her plate.

"If you want. There's other things I can do. If that's what you want, if that's..."

He lapses back into silence. And after a minute or so she figures out what exactly he's offering. And is it offering? Just that? She's not so sure it's that simple. He is, yes, but _I want to._

Offering himself. His _services_.

"Why?" It escapes her in nothing more than a whisper, and she sees the edge of his mouth deform in exaggerated shadow, something that appears to be exasperation but which is in fact probably a good bit milder than that.

 _Really?_

"I wanna make you happy," he says, and sucks in a breath. "I wanna make you feel good. Doin' that, it was..." He shakes his head, once and slowly. Now he sounds faintly stunned. "Never even knew I could do that to anyone."

This _virgin_ in front of her, more virginal than she is, her as his _first kiss_ \- and fuck, she wishes she had known that, she's not sure what difference it would have made but she wishes she had - and he's telling her _this._

She's heard of people having out-of-body experiences for all kinds of reasons, but the sheer intensity of _weirdness_ is a new one for her. She's floating. Watching herself just _sit_ there in the encroaching night, speechless. Hopeless.

He deserves an answer. He needs one.

But he's not waiting for one. He's rolling to his knees and getting to his feet, biting at his thumbnail, moving over to the candles and crouching to chisel away the dead ones with the edge of his knife. She studies the slope of his back, his impossibly broad shoulders, powerful arms. This is a story so old as to almost be another cliche: a knight in the age of Courtly Love, utterly and purely devoted. The stuff of a thousand romance novels, a thousand heady fantasies - fantasies that have never been hers and frankly aren't now. She said she didn't want a slave; that _definitely_ includes a slave of this kind.

And aren't they in the middle of something _kind of important?_ Is this the appropriate time?

Has she lost her mind on yet another level if she's thinking that appropriate enters into this at all anymore?

She gets up.

It's not as difficult as she expected. It still hurts when she flexes those muscles, but the pain remains distant, and while the moonshine has definitely made her wobbly she doesn't tip too far to one side or the other. To her knees and then no further, sliding the jar aside and walking clumsily on them across the floor to him. Not far, but her left knee lands on a stray pebble or bit of stone - something hard and knobby - and she winces sharply, half falls against him just as he turns to catch her. His arms are around her middle and her side is breaking into a fresh chorus of throbbing, but she barely notices. She's gripping his upper arms, old leather cool and supple under her hands and her head is tipped up and back to look at him.

His eyes are very dark.

Cliche after cliche after cliche.

Whatever. Cliches are roadmaps to this unfamiliar terrain. As long as they're in play she might actually have some vague idea of what to expect. What might make sense. What to do.

So.

She presses forward and overlays his mouth with hers, and the shudder that rolls through him is so violent that for a split second she wonders if he might drop her.

But he doesn't.

He also doesn't need to wait for her to coax his lips apart. Not this time. They're already parting, his tongue seeking its way into her, and he moans softly as it strokes along hers, one hand rising to cup her jaw as he pushes deeper. It's so awkward, the arch in her back is uncomfortable and cricking her neck, and all she's aware of is that he's kissing her, really _kissing_ her, no prompting and - as far as she can tell - no fear.

There's tension in him. A hum of nervous energy beneath his skin, palpable, and if she made a false move now he might spook. But none of this feels like that. It just feels good.

It feels so good.

Heat floods into her. His mouth, his hands. Floods in and waterfalls down to her cunt. She sighs, arches even more - and he closes his teeth on her bottom lip and bites down.

Not hard. Not even close to breaking her skin. But he _bites_ and she feels the points of his incisors digging into her, and she thinks about those teeth in her shoulder, the side of her throat, nape of her neck - marking her, _claiming her,_ and the sound she makes is closer to a little cry.

If she dropped a hand between his legs now- if she took his hand and guided it between hers. Beneath her waistband, into her panties. How soaked she is. _That's for you._ Breathed so hot into his ear. Words from a Beth Greene who never should have existed. _That's all you, you did that, that's all for you if you want it._

 _If you want me._

She jerks back with a gasp, blinking into light that seems suddenly ten times as bright. She catches a glimpse of his face, startled and edging toward stricken, and then loses him as he releases her and turns. He's panting, shoulders heaving, and she knows what he was feeling. She _knows._

In her like blood, like marrow.

"It's okay." She reaches for him again; he twitches when she touches his back, and she can tell he's fighting the urge to pull away. But he stays put, allows her to touch him, and under her hand she feels the air roaring in and out of his lungs.

"You didn't do anythin'... It's okay. I swear, Daryl, it's okay."

But despair is a cold stone in the pit of her stomach. Navigation is a joke. She doesn't know where she's going. She's lost in this. Cliche is no help at all.

Once again she's sure he's going to just leave it, refuse to talk about it any further. But he seizes air and hauls it into himself, rising beneath her fingertips, his hair hanging in his face and his voice slightly muffled.

"I don't want this to be wrong."

Her chest cracks. Just splits right the fuck down the middle. A groan beats against her breastbone as her hand falls and catches him by the arm, squeezes. She can't tug him in, doesn't think she should, but she can't just let that sit. Not when he sounds like that. Confused. Worried.

Lost as she is.

"It's not wrong. Daryl, it's not."

Does she know that for certain?

Does she care?

For a measureless period of time there's nothing. He's just _there,_ silent and still, as if he hasn't heard her. Then, abruptly, he shakes himself - shakes her _off_ \- and gets to his feet. He does it heavily, as if his body weighs more than it usually does. More than it should.

"Should get you home."

She gazes up at him as he reaches down a hand. He's not looking at her, and he's not looking at her when she takes it, when she's facing him, when he's stepping past her to get her jacket. He doesn't look at her as they retrace their steps back down the hallway, and he doesn't look at her as she climbs onto the bike behind him. He doesn't look at her, and in the midst of not looking she's filled with the trembling sensation that he can't take his eyes off her.

 _It's gettin' stronger. Feelin' better._

The truth - and really she's known this from the beginning, even if it wasn't something she wanted to _let_ herself know - is that neither of them has much control here. Neither of them has much at all.

But he does look at her when she levers herself off the bike outside her door - when she turns he's staring with those mirrored animal eyes. "You gonna be alright?"

She could tell him to come up with her. Tell him to _stay,_ tell him to curl up on her bed like a loyal hound. He would. She could tell him to go to her bed and do other things for her, _to_ her, and he almost certainly wouldn't hesitate.

She nods and turns away. But like before, like always now, she can feel his eyes on her until she shuts the door behind her. Wolf eyes.

Hunter eyes.

In her apartment, wearily stripping off her clothes in her own dark, she thinks about the need she saw in him, and that she wasn't sure how to understand it. That maybe it was about pleasing her, sure - but more. She couldn't get away from the feeling that there was more. That some of it was _familiar,_ even. Something she's seen when she's looked in the mirror.

She gets it now. Or she's almost positive.

Somehow she never ever really thought about it like this. He has a pack. He has a _cyne._ He has people, friends, what he might even - if she's right about what she's seen - call a kind of family. Fuck of a lot more than she has, than she might ever have again. Maybe he lives alone right now, but he's not _alone._

Except maybe he is.

She's been so lonely for so long. She's needed this, what he's been giving her, and it's not about fucking. It's not. It's about _him._

It never occurred to her that he might feel the same way.


	19. the shivers move down my shoulderblades

**Chapter 19: the shivers move down my shoulderblades in double time**

She doesn't hear from him again for almost a week.

She tries not to worry about that. Late at night, lying in bed in the dark in those shrinking hours - even if the numbers are trending upward - when it's easy for worry to transition into freaking out, she wrestles with the conviction that she's scared him off, that maybe he'll still be _bound to her_ somehow but he won't come near her again unless and until he absolutely has to. That he now regards her as some kind of danger to him. Something dragging him out of control. _Changing_ him. Making him _want._

Right, like he's the only one going through that.

And she wrestles with the even stranger idea that he now regards himself as some kind of danger to _her._

She wrestles until she falls asleep, and then she gets up and goes about the day-to-day business of surviving alone in a shitty part of Atlanta when your life doesn't consist of much except falling asleep and getting up and going about the day-to-day business of surviving alone in a shitty part of Atlanta. She goes to work, buys groceries, does laundry, does meager housework. Fucks around on her phone; she finally got past the Candy Crush level only to get stuck on the next one. Cleans her wound, watches it heal. Wanders. The wandering is something a little new; she never really used to, and now she does because things there _are_ different. She's still certain that she's seeing things only in part, a hazy alternate world overlaying the one she's always occupied, making her perception of things weird but still recognizable. Once or twice she catches sight of other creatures she thinks might be vampires, ducking into alleys and behind buildings. Those enormous things still occasionally swoop through the sky. The light is odd, and sometimes the people she passes are odd as well, and everything simply _feels_ off in a way she can't articulate.

But even that is becoming something she'd consider normal. In terms of that day-to-day, it hasn't changed much. One thing she hasn't seen is more Ytend - which surprises her, given how ubiquitous Daryl had suggested they are. She's not complaining but it's yet another thing on the Weird Pile.

Things continue to refuse to make sense.

And she does have a lot to think about.

She's constantly fingering the knife. At work, at home. On the bus. Trying to be unobtrusive, but unable to keep her hand off it now. _A witch's blade._ That was given to her under mysterious circumstances. That survived a fire which burned the rest of her life to a mound of ashes and blackened bone. That can open portals to a world behind the world, where there sits a shine to a goddess she never knew existed.

A witch's blade. In the midst of all the rest of this weirdness.

She's not so naive as to think that doesn't mean something.

But she doesn't hear from him. And a day passes and another, and she considers getting on that bus and going to him, demanding to talk to him, try to clear things up a little further, _tell_ him _I'm a virgin too, it's okay, and I'm scared and I don't understand any of this and that's okay too, we can be scared and confused together, we don't have to_ do _anything, I just like being with you and I don't want to be alone._

 _And I don't think you do either._

But she stays put.

She doesn't hear from him, and sometimes when she can't take it anymore she slips her hand between her legs and teases herself, strokes and presses and pushes into herself, and yes, sometimes she rolls over and lifts her ass into the air and pumps her curled fingers in and out of her drenched cunt and imagines him there like _that,_ over and above her all teeth and claws- but more and more she imagines him with her like he was, softer and fully a man except for his eyes, leaning over her and kissing her into breathless moans as his hand works at her. Somewhere between rough and gentle, propelling her upward and over in a smooth wave.

And she collapses, gasping and trembling and slick all over her fingers and the insides of her thighs, and she wonders if she can really keep it together.

And she doesn't hear from him.

Until she does.

* * *

It's a rainy Friday and she's pulling the rare morning shift. Stalin doesn't appear to ever wake before noon, and Axel is home with a head cold and needs a day to be human again, so it's just her until four. She's unused to it, and it's only as she's leaning heavily on the counter and yawning exactly every five minutes that she truly realizes it. Once she rushed to rise early - school, and a farm girl always has chores to do, and church on Sundays. Now she usually flops into bed around two or three and she hasn't seen a sunrise in a while, except for when she's stayed up for it or her sleep is broken.

Her rhythm has slid forward and appears to be stuck there. Not that she has much reason to reset it, but all at once - counting out change - she thinks about all those sunrises she doesn't see anymore and all that darkness in which she spends her time now, and how winter is bearing down on the world and it's only getting darker, and the wave of sadness that crashes into her washes the breath out of her lungs.

She doesn't miss a beat in the change-counting, but once she's alone again she slumps forward and squeezes her eyes shut and pulls at her hair.

She never finished with her grieving. She'd like to think she did, but she didn't. Her whole life is defined by it. Soaked in it, like that darkness.

Only now she looks into the darkness and she sees something looking back at her, beautiful green-gold mirrors. She hurts and she's tired and she's not sure what her life has turned into and is still becoming, but there's him, at least in some capacity. Even now, even if he doesn't come near her again unless he has no choice.

 _Shit._

"Beth?"

Low, rough, weirdly smooth at the core. A little unsure, a little awkward. Quiet, like he's not certain who might be listening. She jerks her head up, blinking, fighting the urge to scrub childish knuckles over her eyes - the world is blurry from the lingering pressure against her eyeballs but she can focus enough to see him, a figure in front of the counter that looks like it's made of solid shadow. Emphasis on the _solid_ part; even blurred, he somehow manages to be the most _real_ thing in the room.

She honestly thought he might not come to her again. Not on his own. If only she had the faintest idea what the fuck he's doing here.

Well, if she waits, maybe he'll tell her.

Or maybe she can just ask him.

"Daryl?"

"Yeah." In focus now, hair in his eyes like always and clothes ragged at the ends, presenting himself with a decided dearth of _kempt,_ and shifting from foot to foot like he's not comfortable in here, because he's almost certainly not. He wasn't last time. Thankfully the place is empty except for him. "Uh. Hi."

"Hi." So this is the start of _some_ kind of conversation, anyway.

At this point she's not prepared to be all that choosy. She's just happy to see him. She's puzzled, but she is. It's really that simple. She's not sure how much of it she's showing, not sure how much of it she _should_ show, but regardless. Yes.

He glances down, back up at her, bites at the corner of his lip. "You doin' alright?"

She manages a faint smile. No, it's not about managing; she smiles because she wants to, because she means it. It's faint but that doesn't make it any less real, and it's welcome on her face. She hasn't smiled very much in the last year, and she used to smile all the time, and it's another thing to miss if she allows herself to remember. "You haven't been watchin' me?"

He rolls a shoulder, bites at the edge of his forefinger and looks at her through his hair. There are times, she's realizing, where his entire affect makes him look sort of like an oversized _kid,_ someone who's barely settled into a very awkward adolescence. Practically squirming in his own skin. And she doesn't think it's because he can change that skin into something else.

It might be part of why the age thing doesn't bother her. Doesn't even feel like a _thing_. She feels like he could be her own age.

Or even younger.

"Maybe I've been backin' off a little."

She cocks her head, frowning. This isn't what she wanted. Part of her had been hoping he was. Hoping he was coming at least that close, close enough to see her from a distance. "I didn't actually tell you to."

"You didn't seem happy about it."

"If I wanted you to stop I would've told you." And so she would. She's sure of that. She's not speaking sharply, not harsh, but she's disappointed and she's not going to hide _that_ \- even if, she realizes suddenly, it might do worse than what she'd intend.

She really might have to be careful with him. Not because he could hurt her, but because it's possible that _she_ can do damage she doesn't even know about.

Something in his expression hardens briefly, and passes. If he's irritated, once again she doesn't think it's really with _her_.

"You should look on your sidewalk."

She stares at him, blinks. This seems like a non sequitur. "What?"

"Your sidewalk," he repeats, a bit louder. Head lifted. "In front of your door. Side of the door, too." He pauses. "Also 'round back."

She keeps staring, turning the words over and over, looking for the sense in them. Because there _is_ sense there. She can... Well. She can sense its outlines, like furniture hidden beneath a dropcloth. But she's damned if she knows what it is. Damned if she can see the whole thing, regardless of what she's being told to _look at_.

"What the hell are you talkin' about?"

"You're safe," he says, and steps closer. "Enough, anyway. Here too." He jerks his head at the door. "Out there."

And all at once she knows what he's talking about.

She had seen them. Passed them and seen them, and they were strange enough to catch her attention for a few seconds, though it's not like she's not spoiled for _strange_ these days. The sidewalk. Here too. She missed the one by her door, and she wouldn't have any reason to go behind the building except to toss her trash in the dumpster, but if she did, she knows now what would be there.

On the sidewalk right outside her door. On the pavement just outside this one. Chalk, except it's not chalk, because it's rained since she noticed it and it hasn't washed clean. Hasn't even smudged. But it also doesn't look like paint. A series of crossed lines and curves, patterned over three concentric circles. Complex and yet oddly simple. And somehow familiar.

She noticed. But she didn't _notice_ that she noticed.

"You did that," she says softly. "Didn't you?"

He nods. "Sigils. Protection."

"Magic?"

"Mhmm." He sighs. "If I couldn't be there, wasn't gonna just... I can't be here all the time anyway. And somethin' might come after you now. Know you're here." Back to the edge of his finger. As usual, he's twitchy, but it seems worse than normal. More discomfort. "It wouldn't stop everythin'. But probably most of what you'd worry about."

She just looks at him for another few seconds, processing. His nervousness. The impression that he feels almost as if he's confessing something. That he wants to do right by her, for whatever motivation, and he genuinely might not know how.

Probably doesn't.

"Thank you," she whispers, because she's not thinking, and it hits her all over again, hard, when that deep little tremor rolls through him and he lowers his head, takes a breath.

Shit. Maybe she just shouldn't say that at all.

But it makes him feel good. She can't be absolutely positive, but she's pretty close on it: it makes him _happy._ If this is really what he likes, what he wants... Should she be denying him? If no one's forcing him to do anything, if it's what he chooses, does it matter _why_ he's choosing it?

Rick's voice, low and quiet beneath his pale eyes. _You don't have any more choice than he does. You can ignore it, try to pretend it ain't there, but he won't be able to, so in the end you won't either._

 _He's bound to you. For life._

Right now he's looking at her again, and there's something expectant in his half hidden eyes.

And he hasn't explained his presence. Here, in the daylight, in which he _still_ doesn't look like he fully belongs.

"Did you hear somethin'?" Because it seems like the likeliest thing. Though if he did, it's strange that he hasn't mentioned it yet. She pushes her hair over her shoulder, shakes herself slightly. "From Shane?"

"No. He ain't got nothin' yet." He hesitates - he _does_ have something he wants to say. It's every bit as obvious as if it was literally beating against the inside of his skin, lifting it with every impact, cartoon-like. Trying to bust out of there and be said. But he's wrestling with it, and for a second or two his nervousness - which has been mostly background radiation - jumps to a peak and she half expects him to go for the door.

Instead he appears to come to some kind of decision - or maybe it's a victory - and he steps closer. Right up to the counter. Very close, less than half a foot away. She could touch him without fully extending her arm.

She keeps her hands right the fuck where they are.

"When're you done here?"

That's unexpected. Not the first time he's asked her that, but somehow she wasn't expecting to hear it twice. Especially not after the way that night concluded. Then again, she wasn't exactly _expecting_ to hear anything at _all._ She rubs at the nape of her neck and performs a quick mental scramble for the time. She could actually look but she has something of an internal clock on her more present days, and it's reliable.

It's just after noon.

"I'm outta here at four." She tilts her head. She's apprehensive about this, and she's not sure of the reason, and she doesn't want to be. Doesn't want to be apprehensive. Doesn't want to be sure. "Why?"

"Alright." He steps back from the counter as if he hasn't heard the question - and something in him has loosened. Not just muscles - powerful arms and broad shoulders, his spine - but something deeper into the finer details. Like his hands, his expression. Relaxed the smallest bit, as if he's passed beyond some tight point and now things are opening out all around him, and he can breathe again. "I'll come back."

" _Daryl._ " He's backing toward the door - not nerves this time, not as far as she can tell, but simply that he doesn't feel like turning around yet. In fact, it's remotely possible that he's almost _smiling._ "Why?"

"Got somethin' I wanna show you," he says.

And the door jingles and he's gone. Gone as suddenly and completely as if he was never there.

She looks after him for a long moment, her fingers drumming an unconscious tattoo on the counter. She has no idea what to make of what just happened, and no idea what to make of how she feels about it. Which is confused and maybe the tiniest fraction annoyed.

But mostly good. He came to her, and he wasn't even _kind of_ at ease... But he did want to be there. She's sure of that.

So all right. He has something to show her. She'll wait for him, and she'll see what she sees.

* * *

He's parked around the side by the air dispenser, smoking and colorless in the gray October afternoon. He looks up as she approaches, plucks the cigarette from between his lips and flicks it into a puddle. It's still chilly, spitting rain, and he's standing in it and should maybe be cold, but the relative ease from before hasn't left him, and once again he gives her something that she might be willing to call a smile.

This really might be okay. _Weird,_ but what isn't?

He's helping her, and she doesn't think it's because he feels like he's being forced to. It's making him feel good. It's making him happy. She's not going to try to stop that anymore. Not right now, anyway, not while things are manageable.

Her jacket isn't thick enough. She hugs herself, shivers a little when she reaches him and halts.

"Hi."

He regards her, evaluating. "Shoulda dressed warmer."

"You gonna keep doin' this?" But she's not irritated now. Not mostly. Amusement is more the size of it; she gets the sense that this is part of the whole scyldig Thing - a need to protect, a kind of constant ambient concern, and she really doesn't think that he means to be condescending.

They've fought together. He's seen her. _Shed blood in battle._ He's never given her any reason to believe he feels anything for her and for that but an automatic, unquestioning respect.

Christ, he's so strange.

He ducks his head, obviously chastened, and she touches his arm. "It's okay, just... You don't need to worry. Like that. The sigils and everythin'... I like that. That's fine. You're right, you can't be there all the time, and I've seen what... I've seen what can happen. But you don't need to make sure I _dress warm._ Alright?"

He nods, raises his eyes to her without raising his head. Hesitant again. "'s gonna be kinda cold where we're goin', though. You wanna get somethin'?"

"I'll be fine." When really what she wants is to not go back to that fucking apartment. Wherever he wants to take her - hasn't this been the content of a number of her fantasies? Just riding with him, anywhere but all the places in which she now feels trapped?

He nods again, swings a leg over and rumbles the engine to life. "Alright. Get on."

She does, wraps her arms around him, and he takes them away.

And it's exactly what she needed.

* * *

The rain is tapering off as he takes them east and slightly north, along wider streets beginning to crowd in with early rush hour traffic. As usual he's weaving in and out in a way that would be horrendously irresponsible and very dangerous in any other context, but when he does it she doesn't feel afraid. Like how he said she wouldn't need a helmet: somehow she's _safe_ on the back of this thing in a way that goes far beyond conventional safety. As if they're subtly out of phase with the world to a degree where obstacles won't send them flying, they won't collide with cars, won't skid or hydroplane over the slick asphalt, they won't spin out. The air itself will keep them upright and in place, and move things out of their way.

Hell, maybe that's exactly what's going on.

The houses spread out and crowd in and spread out again, nicer and nicer, more spacious and better kept lawns, lots of older brick, stately porches and pillars in ways that also manage to avoid being ostentatious. The streets are shady with trees thick on the ground, low oaks and tall pines. There are plenty of trees where she lives, plenty of grassy open space, but it's all scrubby overgrown wasteland, littered with trash, somehow unhealthy even at its lushest. Even in the dying stage of autumn, leaves scattering everywhere all the time - wet now and sticking to everything - these look full and alive.

She doesn't feel right, here.

The downtown skyscrapers are looming on the horizon, reflective slate against fog-gray, and she thinks maybe they'll swing south and head there, but he makes a sharp turn onto another wide street, and she looks to the left and recognizes where they are.

She knows Piedmont Park is there. Once, when she was little, she went there - weekend day trip into the city - and she remembers the Botanical Garden, a riot of color in early summer, pinks and purples like the sunset after a storm, blinding red and luminous gold.

She's not very surprised when he turns the bike left again, between two stone pillars and onto a long drive flanked by rolling green. In the distance, shimmering even in a day full of bloodless light, is a lake.

She remembers that. In the car, in the back seat, Maggie next to her. Pointing something out, hand near Beth's cheek. Shawn was laughing at something else, something to do with Maggie, and she was swatting him. Mama reaching back to do her own swatting, telling them both to quit it.

A flock of birds exploding out of the grass, flooding upward. The sun was bright that day.

She realizes that she's pressing her face against Daryl's back, his shoulder, and her eyes are open but the world has blurred away. The wind is cool on her cheeks. Drying.

She uncurls one arm to wipe at herself, hard. Almost angry. Not at him. He couldn't have known.

But now she just wants to know why they're here.

Past the lake - no birds now, at least not in the grass and not enough to explode. Past the flat green fakery of the tennis courts, more lawns. Expansive brick and white pillars of one of several event halls. Out and around and not stopping, not slowing more than he already has, and she knows all at once where he's taking them.

Jesus, he could have told her. He could have _told_ her.

He didn't know. She didn't know. She didn't even remember she was here before, until now. How the fuck was she supposed to know it would hurt this much?

She closes her eyes. It doesn't matter.

They're dead.

There aren't many cars in the lot when he pulls through, parks and cuts the engine. Beth raises her head and blinks, rubs at her face, pushes her hair back; she's damp even though the rain stopped a while ago, and the simple, sudden lack of movement is making her feel like she's waking up from a vividly fluid dream.

She releases him as he gets off and turns to her. She looks up at him; he doesn't offer her a hand. Doesn't offer her anything. He's just there, present if she needs him for something - and waiting, a sudden cold breeze pulling at his hair. She shivers again; he said it would be cold, and she supposes this means he was right, and part of her is wishing they _had_ gone back for her heavier coat.

But they didn't, and now they're here.

She climbs off the bike and looks back at him. Waiting just like he is. Waiting, trying to keep her face as neutral as she can. And hoping he won't notice that she's been crying.

Among other things she doesn't want him to feel bad about bringing her here - whatever his ultimate reason - and if she tells him what happened, she knows he will.

"So where're we goin?" Brisk. Not cheerful. She doesn't want to even attempt cheerful; she's not sure when she last _was_ cheerful. But brisk, she can do.

He nods in the direction of the road, which has become solely a pedestrian thoroughfare. "C'mon."

She follows him across to the garden itself, to the garden _s,_ down one of the paths past wispy mounds of pink mulhy and borders of crimson mountain sage. The rain may have stopped but the wind has picked up - far more than a breeze now - and it shakes the trees, makes them hiss as if they resent having more of their leaves stripped away before they're ready to be dropped. They pass an elderly woman under a now-unnecessary umbrella, a young man jogging with the cord of his earbuds swinging against his chest, and no one else.

It's yet another strange thing: the Botanical Garden is a tourist attraction as well as a spot for locals, and even if it's autumn, things are still blooming. They have another hour or so until dusk, and even then the place won't close.

So where is everyone?

She considers asking. Then she doesn't. In her head it's a reasonable question, but she's not sure how to put it to actual words.

Then she focuses ahead - toward what she now sees is the end of this particular path - and she sucks in a breath as all awareness of the cold leaves her. This _has_ to be where they're headed. This has to be it.

Though she's not sure, looking at it, why he would want to show her this in particular.

It's very impressive. It's very _beautiful._ A multi-tiered fountain set against the side of a small slope - really a waterfall, all graceful gray stone - and to the right, on the higher edge of the bank, an enormous green statue of a woman from the shoulders up, her hair a flowing flowerbed of shades of green. Nothing in bloom there, not now, but the green remains. The woman's ageless face is calm, serene, eyes half closed in contemplation of her own raised left hand, from which pours a stream of water.

Not a woman. A goddess. Beth knows it instantly. Not Eostre - at least not exactly - and maybe not any goddess who does or ever has really existed in that way. But a goddess all the same. And somehow, beneath all that lifeless gray, her green is even deeper. Richer. More alive.

Daryl is gazing at it, hands in his pockets, and she touches his arm.

"Is this it?"

He shoots her a glance. "What, you don't like it?"

Given the words his voice is unexpectedly devoid of anxiety, and after a few seconds she realizes that he's teasing her. Just a little.

"Yeah," she says softly. "I do." She does. This place isn't set back from the path in any way, isn't hidden, must be an attraction in and of itself on more well-attended days, but nevertheless, something about it feels secret. Separate. Not quite of the world through which they traveled to get here.

Though even that world isn't what it used to be.

"Well, this ain't it." He steps past her to the stone lip of the fountain's bottom tier and drops to one knee, drawing his knife and bending to scratch its point across the path's edge. This time she doesn't have to ask what he's doing, and she takes a breath, biting her lip as apprehension rushes through her.

The Scead. Why? It had been beautiful too - she guesses, in its hallucinatory, unsettling way - but why would they go back there now?

But she doesn't ask. She watches as he rapidly scratches a complicated series of figures in a rough circle - and she shouldn't be able to remember, not at that level of detail, but she would swear they aren't exactly the same runes that he used at the farm.

Makes sense, probably. If this is indeed another Night Gate, it's not the same one. Maybe a different key is required to open it.

Abruptly he stops, pushes to his feet and turns, and once again she's not astonished when a widening tear opens up in the world and starlit darkness pours through. Beyond it, the edge of the fountain. The goddess's face - essentially, Beth notes with some relief, the same as it is here, with no divine-looking lights or auras drifting around it, and no sign of otherworldly life.

But she looks at the gate and her gut still twists.

Daryl has turned again and is studying her, and is clearly growing concerned, brow furrowed beneath the fall of his hair. "Y'alright?"

She transfers her focus from the gate to his face and reaches deep, finds a center, builds herself around it and nods. Then inclines her head at the tear in the world. "What's in there?"

"You already know what's in there."

"That's not what I mean." She's trying very hard to not sound sharp, impatient - please, God, not afraid - and to her relief, she doesn't. She merely sounds insistent, holding her ground. Without her consciously intending to, her hand has shifted to her knife, her palm against the hilt. "What do you want to show me?"

He cocks his head, and as he does - standing there framed by night, the shadows appearing to gather around him and draw him in - it hits her that she's once more forgotten what he actually is. She hasn't seen it in him for a while now, except for his eyes. Even when she slips a hand between her legs and thinks about him that way, more and more of the time he's like this.

But he's not. He's not human at all. And she sees it now, under his skin, as if the starlight is bleeding through. As if it's his own shadow cast behind him, bigger and thicker, pricked ears and narrow head, huge hands finger-tipped with claws.

He flashes her the quickest of smiles - but a _smile_ \- and his teeth really do flash. Long, sharp. "I gotta tell you?"

She crosses her arms. But it's hard to keep herself here, seeing him like that. She wants to go to him. She wants to touch him, find his fur, run her hands over it and comb her fingers through. "Why wouldn't you?"

"'cause I want it to be a surprise."

Because he. Oh.

"You keep surprisin' me and it keeps fuckin' me up," she says simply - no accusation, no blame, and certainly no anger. It's just true, and she's not even the only one getting fucked up, and he simply nods, granting the accuracy.

"This ain't gonna do that."

She arches a brow. "Sure?"

"Pretty sure." He lifts a hand, extends it to her, and she sees it. She sees the hand _under_ the hand, clawed and fur-coated fingers and the naked black dog-pad of a palm.

He can't guarantee her safety. Not even on the bike.

So she shouldn't expect him to.

"Alright," she says softly, and goes to him, takes his hand, and without any more hesitation she steps through.

* * *

She has to keep still for a moment, breathing. Settling her feet into the ground, waiting for her vision to adjust - not to the darkness but to the place itself, and she doesn't remember feeling this last time. It was _weird_ , before, surreal, but it wasn't disorienting in this way, almost to the point of vertigo. His hand is in hers, warm and firm, fingers weaved, and that's something, that's good, but...

She swallows, squeezes her eyes shut and opens them again. It doesn't _look_ significantly different than what she saw before - except for the change in scenery. But it is.

Something here is very, very different.

She turns her head, looks up at him, and relief washes over her when the world doesn't spin as badly as she thought it might. All around them is essentially the same garden. The same fountain, the same woman, the same flowerbeds - except, she suddenly sees, that the flowers are all cast in silver, and glowing with more than just starlight. And, just over his shoulder, Atlanta's towers.

Made entirely of light. Light that blots out the stars, rising into the black sky until its beams are lost to view.

She inhales sharply and he glances in their direction, following her gaze. "Yeah," he says quietly. "They're... That's complicated."

 _No fucking kidding_. She gives him a small, wry smile. "Is anything _not?_ "

He breathes a laugh. "Yeah. Anyway. C'mon." He tugs her hand, moving up toward the grassy slope opposite the woman-goddess, and to the treeline beyond.

Through that line the foliage thickens, a lot and very fast. A few feet in and the darkness crashes down on them, on _her,_ and she finds herself beating at the leaves and thin, bending branches in front of her, barely able to see her own hands and fighting unwelcome panic. The sky has been reduced to starry cracks in the canopy. All around them is rustling that sounds far more like whispers. In the distance ahead of them she can make out faint roaring, like an excited crowd in a stadium a mile away.

And it's cold. It's _cold._

"It's alright." Hand tight around hers and then arm around _her,_ and she leans into him, breathing hard, flushed with embarrassment. Okay, sure, maybe he respects her. Maybe he doesn't actually think of her as a _helpless little girl._ She would still really rather not look like one in front of him.

But she doesn't shrug him off.

And he pulls her closer, at the same time moving forward again. His progress is easy, effortless, sliding through the dark as if the vegetation is parting for him - which maybe it is - and he can see perfectly well - which he probably can. The cold is increasing, hardening the air, but he's big and warm and his warmth is enveloping her, and it's all she can do to keep from _snuggling_ against him.

She probably shouldn't. That probably wouldn't be a great move.

The whispering is getting louder. The roaring is getting louder too - and it's not roaring at all. It's something different, something she _knows_ she's never heard before - except has she? Now she's not sure, and she's rifling through her own brain for what it might be, suddenly and oddly frantic, when the cold _slams_ into her like an open hand, almost rocks her off her feet. Daryl has her, has her even tighter, and she spins against him, trying to claw air into lungs far too freaked out to expand-

And she looks to her right, and the ground is _gone_.

So is everything else.


	20. my blood is singing with your voice

**Chapter 20: my blood is singing with your voice**

She would scream.

She really doesn't want to. Only about half of her is lost in mindless panic. But that half is still big enough and strong enough to make some use of her vocal cords. It would need air for that, though, which is something she doesn't have. She's simply clutching Daryl's arms, his shoulders, whatever part of him she can reach, clinging. Jaw tight, eyes watering - that last because it's _cold,_ and the wind is screaming up from the nothingness below and howling through the void in front of her.

Except it's not nothing, and it's not a void.

It's not that at all.

They're standing at the edge of what she supposes would have to be called a cliff. She can't see if there's a rockface extending downward like a cliff would generally have, but she can look to the right and the left and see the same in both directions. The world - the grass and trees and ground and _everything_ \- just… stops. Disappears.

In its place, to either side and below and in front of her as far as she can see, is a swirling vortex of light.

Only it's not light. It's something else. The saner part of her mind is pretty sure that she's not actually _seeing_ what she's looking at, that her brain is simply translating it into a visual form that she can comprehend. That won't drive her completely mad. There's no way this is light; it's all color, it's _every_ color all at once and surging and rolling like a sea in the middle of a storm. Sometimes things that look like the faint outlines of planets rise into view and fall away again before she can really make them out. And it's _dark,_ also, as dark as the sky that still arcs over them, still full of stars. Light that contains pitch darkness without any contradiction.

It's all one. It's all the same.

She gapes at it, mouth open, trembling, and Daryl holds her tight. Beneath everything else he remains solid and warm, arms so strong around her, and she feels safe. Knows she is.

Which is good, because she can also feel that she's beginning to lose pieces of herself, falling away into the chasm, sinking into that brilliance. The longer she looks at it, the more she can see. She's sure. It's rising to meet her, reaching for her with luminous tendrils, and its heart is opening up to her, unfolding. Unfurling. _Blooming._

Petals. Color emerging, one, though still all of them. All contained in this penultimate hue, pounding into her eyes like blood.

Like _blood._

 _like red it's red it's_

He squeezes and shakes her, gentle. His calloused fingers holding her jaw carefully but firmly and turning her face to his. Maybe he's gentle, sure, but it's like he's slapped her, seized her with those lovely clear _inhuman_ eyes and pinned her to the air. She takes a breath, another, and slowly she feels herself slipping back into her own mind, her body - as if he's caught her and is reeling her in.

She leans against him. It's okay to do that. She can lean and feel safe - know that beautiful madness is less than ten yards from her but she's safe.

Because she is.

He releases her jaw but she doesn't look away, doesn't look down - her head tipped back to look up at him. And maybe he's released her but his hand is still there, touching her, pleasantly rough fingers against her cheeks.

Like he's not sure what to do with them now.

He also doesn't appear to be sure of what to do with his face. It's not that he's not expressive; he _is,_ but untangling it all is a monumental task and she knows better than to try. What she sees there isn't bad, at least, it doesn't worry her, and that's something.

She doesn't think he wants to stop touching her, and she doesn't think that - for the moment - the impulse troubles him.

"Y'alright?"

Slowly, she nods. Slow is about the extent she can handle, and there are a lot of other things she's not at all sure of. But she's all right. Shaky. Definitely not ready to let go of him.

She takes a long, shuddering breath and glances to the right again - quick. It's all she dares, though the tug she feels when she does isn't as intense as it was. And regardless, that bizarre, hallucinatory glow is everywhere, pervading everything. It's touching her skin, touching his, caressing, doing indescribable things. Sometimes it appears to be doing nothing at all. And that roar…

"What-" She swallows hard. She barely has the saliva to do it with. "What the fuck _is_ it?"

"The Dwolma." He takes a few steps back, pulling her with him. He's smiling again, very faint but unquestionably there. "It's… There's places in the Scead where things get thin. Where it's like… Scead inside the Scead. Only what's out there is different."

Now that they're moving - little shuffling steps, which is fine, because she's not yet entirely secure with big ones - she can look at it again, and for longer. She's not falling anymore, even though it's a punch in the face that ripples all down through her chest cavity and gut like a brick tossed into a pond. The swirling light that isn't light at all. The heaving of the planet-things. The infinite complexity she senses just beneath its surface - and the _order._ What she's seeing appears to be chaos, and it is, but that's not _all_ it is.

It makes no sense.

So it fits in very well with literally everything else.

She turns against him, in his arms, angling herself so she's facing the cliff and her shoulder is pressing into his chest. Unconsciously she lifts a hand and lays it over his forearm where it crosses her middle. Feels the subtle flex of the muscle there. Feels his ribcage expand with his breath, that same breath warm against her ear.

Somehow it's not distracting. Somehow it and the incomprehensibility in front of her are a perfect fit with each other, intertwining and interweaving like clasped hands.

"So what's out there?" She points to one of the planet things as it rises again, rolls - its surface streaked with clouds that put her in mind of Jupiter - and sinks away again. "What's that?"

The warmth puffing across her skin intensifies, and before she can stop herself she's shivering, shivering violently, curling into the cradle of his body with her hand gripping his arm so tight she watches her fingertips press into his flesh.

And she feels him smile. Feels him smile, and - maybe it's her imagination and maybe it's not - feels his teeth against the shell of her ear.

"Another universe."

* * *

She walks with him.

There's some space between them now, a little, but her fingers are still threaded with his and there is no way in _hell_ she's letting him go. They're too near. It's getting better every second - with exposure, maybe, could be she's building up some kind of tolerance to chasms that open onto other universes - but there's the secure anchor of his hand, and as far as she's concerned it's not weakness to take full advantage. And though she can feel that it's cold, feel that the wind is _there,_ the cold itself isn't piercing her like it was. It's an academic fact and not much more. She can bear it.

So they walk along the edge for a while, a good three feet or so between them and it - which isn't even really a cliff. It doesn't break away in places. The edge isn't ragged. The world just _ends._ And her focus slides from him to her own boots to the chasm - the _Dwolma_ \- and down to their joined hands. For a few seconds.

Then away again.

"Why does it look like that?" She glances over at it, gnawing at her lip. She really should be more frightened than she is. Most of what she feels is a kind of freaked-out fascination. "Is that what the universe looks like… inside?"

He shrugs. "Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not. What you're seein', that's the membrane. That's not the thing itself."

"Membrane?"

"Barrier. Actually it's more like a…" He waves vaguely with his free hand. "Kind of a space between. It's its own thing."

"Is it dangerous?" Again, curiosity. No real fear. So what if it is? Lots of things are dangerous these days.

Almost everything.

"If you go jumpin' into it, yeah. I'm not sure what would happen, but I'm guessin' wouldn't be nothin' good."

"It was pullin' me," Beth whispers, and though she's staring ahead at the silvery grass beneath her boots, she doesn't miss the abrupt sharpness of his look.

"Pullin'? How?"

She swings her head up to look back, brow furrowed and disquiet wriggling through her stomach. "I thought you knew. I thought you could… Y'know. Tell. Like with Eostre."

"This ain't Eostre." He hasn't shifted his gaze from her, and it's gone keen. Eyes narrowed, almost lost in a fall of shadow from a hanging bough. No sign of worry that she can see, but his wheels are turning, and rapidly. He's working something out. Or trying. "How was it pullin'?"

"I dunno." Suddenly frustration is clenching at her; describing the thing itself is essentially impossible, and now she has to try to describe what it was _doing_ to her? "It was… I felt like it was reachin' for me. And I could see into it. Like, further down. Or maybe it was just gettin' clearer. I dunno, Daryl, I don't-"

"What did you see?" Quiet. But those four words have all the hard, even edges of cut stones. He's not excited, not eager, but he _wants to know,_ and clearly he's not going to explain why.

She sighs, almost pulls her hand away - and doesn't. "Look, it wasn't even…"

 _Red. Red, red, red. Spreading, expanding. Pulling back. Wider. Red, all red._

 _A field of red. And something else._

 _Something dark._

"I dunno," she says softly. "I'm sorry, Daryl. I'm just… I dunno, I dunno what I saw. I don't think I even remember all of it."

 _Liar._

But why would she be lying?

He keeps his gaze trained on her for a moment or two, then looks away at the grass ahead, up and over at the swaying trees. They're still whispering, but all the sound has lowered, even the roar, receded like a tide into a constant buzzing thrum. Now that it's not overwhelming her, she can hear that there's a kind of musical quality in it, a melody she can almost pick out. Nothing pleasant - discordant, chaotic like the most modern of modern compositions - but even that's too simple; there's harmony as well, buried under the chaos, rising now and then like the planets.

She wants to hum along.

She's lost in it again - not dangerously so, she doesn't think, but lost all the same - when he halts. She blinks, focuses, and sees that they've come to a stop in front of a smooth, wide series of boulders, almost an outcropping, rolling all the way to the edge until they simply vanish into nothing. Daryl releases her and clambers up onto the lowest, turns and offers her a hand.

Not knowing what else to do - what else she _could_ do - she takes it, and he lifts her as lightly as if she was half her weight.

They're higher by a good few feet, but she no longer feels precarious. She edges a little closer to the boulder's terminus - and then, obeying some impulse she would never ever under any circumstances have _ever_ given into in any other context, she sits down on the edge, her legs swinging and her hands braced on the rock, looking down.

It's pulling, yes. But now it's easy. _Let it pull._ This universe might not be ideal, but she's functioning in it, and it's a devil she knows.

Daryl takes a seat next to her, brushes the side of her hand with the side of his. It might be accidental.

It might.

"So why'd you bring me here?"

"It's beautiful," he says simply. And there's a thin current of anxiety under his tone, but only very thin. "Don't you think it's beautiful?"

"I do."

Her voice is soft. She's not looking at him. She's still gazing down at the impossibility churning under her feet, and even if its seduction is manageable now, that doesn't mean it isn't capturing her. Holding her with the sheer furious depth of her wonder. Her awe. And this time it's very, very purposeful when she creeps her hand over his, over the hair on the back - surprisingly soft - the scarred knobs of his knuckles, the callouses that don't just stop with his finger pads. This is a hand she's sure someone else might call ugly in its roughness and its thickness, a hand really almost like a paw already, but she touches it and feels its warmth and that warmth floods into her. Through her ribcage, the cradle of her belly. Her hips.

She's beginning to understand that this man is not at all what she thought he was, and it's not just that he's not even a man.

He's the kind of man who shows a girl the end of the world because he thinks she'll find it beautiful.

And he's right.

"Thank you," she says, equally soft, and this time she _feels_ the tremor flow through him, gentle and deep, and feels his breath catch in his chest. Out of the corner of her vision she sees his eyes half close. She doesn't feel a sense of apprehension, as if more power has been put into her hands than she wants.

She's just happy, finally looking at him. She's happy that she made him feel good. Made _him_ happy.

She wonders how often he's truly happy at all.

"Why is it here?"

He shakes himself, clears his throat and bites at his lip and stares at nothing in particular - she's guessing because it's the only center he can find. "Ain't no one reason. Not that anyone knows. They just happen. This one… Maybe somethin' about the city. How it was built, how it kept bein' built." He rolls a shoulder. "Maybe somethin' happened since then."

"So there's really other universes?" It's not actually such a strange idea. It's the kind of concept that stoned college kids and physicists both will occasionally float as a genuine possibility. The latter even bring evidence to the table, albeit usually numerical evidence that no one else is able to grasp. But she's _here,_ it's right in front of her - below her - and it's not a hallucination or a dream or an illusion.

She knows what she's seeing. Can feel.

Daryl nods.

"How many?"

"No one knows that either." He bites at the edge of his thumb again. "Lots."

"Are they anythin' like this one?"

"Could be. Ain't ever exactly got no _mission reports_ or nothin'." Normally she might expect him to be getting impatient with this interrogation, but he's answering question after question with perfect patience. Could be that he knew bringing her here would get that out of her.

Or it could be that he genuinely doesn't mind.

"So people _have_ tried to go through."

"A few." His jaw tightens moodily - not her, she's nearly positive. Something else. Maybe the contemplation of that. Of losing people. Because she's sensed a strange kind of desperation in all of them, the few times she's seen them, and she's had a week or so to think on it. There's something _wrong,_ and it's more than just the Ytend, and it's more than what she gathers is a mysterious loss of contact with other Hathsta.

She moves her hand over his - not a caress, but close. In the ballpark. Coming in from the outfield. "What's wrong, Daryl?"

He jerks his head around at her, brows raised. "What's- Nothin'. I'm fine."

She's not sure she completely buys that, but she forges ahead anyway. "I don't mean just you. I mean all of you. Everythin'. 'cause I'm gettin' the sense there is, and you're all kinda… She sighs and waves her hand vaguely in the air. Sometimes words are impediments, but sometimes she's also not totally sure they matter. "I dunno. Freakin' out."

Precisely the wrong phrase to use and she knows it instantly, but it's too late to take back. His eyes narrow again and she prepares to shift out of the way - not from any physical attack but just because she's not sure she wants to be in close proximity to whatever offense he's feeling now.

But it doesn't come. He lowers his head, attention appearing to resettle on the hand he's rested on his knee, and he's quiet for a long moment. And just when she's sure he's not going to say anything at all, that she should have just left it alone because maybe she's actually _hurt_ him somehow, he lifts his head and meets her gaze dead-on. Hard.

Sad.

"Beth…" He takes a breath. "We're dyin'."

He was quiet for a long moment. Her moment is longer.

 _Dying._

The first thing she thinks of is cancer. Heart disease. Something like that. Chronic illness, waiting to strike or eating away at someone until there's nothing left, until they die a dried-up husk in some hospital all run through with tubes and hooked to beeping machines that eventually fall silent one by one.

And she thinks of him, and everything in her coils into a chilled knot of _no._

But he said _we._

"I-I don't," she stutters, her voice barely above a whisper, and leaves it at that. Which is okay, because - and she knows this is kindness, sparing her the task of trying to formulate the question - he's continuing, his voice softly grating. Somehow both smooth and jagged at the ends.

"We ain't breedin'. Generation's gettin' smaller. Mine, Rick's? Hardly any babies. Any that're one of us." He pauses again, chewing at the inside of his lip. She realizes that her hand is still over his, and he hasn't made any move to push her away. Now and then it's twitching very slightly, as if it wants to do something and he's not sure what.

She's not altogether certain that it's a good idea to prod. She does anyway. "One of you?"

"Rick's got two kids," Daryl says shortly, syllables clipped. "Both human. Carol's got one. The same. Michonne had one, actually _was_ Hathsta, but she…" He falls silent and looks away. "She don't got him no more."

"So…" Someday, _someday,_ she'll receive information that simply _tells_ her something, clears something up, and that'll be that, instead of only confusing her even further. "You can have human children?"

"Most of 'em are. Used to be less human ones, but now it's-"

"Is it…" She fidgets. This is wandering into territory that rolls and seethes, like the endless chaos of the Dwolma. "Is it just when you… mate with humans? Or is it-"

"No." He shakes his head, once, firmly, and he's still not looking at her - and it feels like he's not looking at her in a way which is taking a particular kind of effort on his part. "We can only mate with humans."

Everything in her folds in on itself, flushing, hot, running liquid in the center. One gigantic _oh._

"You can't mate with other-"

"Birth defects," he says, and there's almost an audible _snap_ in the silence that follows the last word. Finality. And she knows she's not going to get anything else out of him, out of that. Not now.

That's not really the point, anyway. Or it shouldn't be.

"So no matter what, they're all human now?"

"All the ones we've heard of in the last… Fuck. I dunno." He exhales heavily and passes his free hand over his face, tugging at the scruff at his chin. "Used to be hundreds of thousands of us. Carol says another generation of this and there might be… A few hundred? Less? We don't know how many of us there are _now._ We ain't even heard from anyone else in over a year. Cyne all used to be connected. Now…"

He shrugs again.

"You're cut off," Beth murmurs.

He nods.

"But what about…" She stops, sucking in air, every muscle in her clenching and releasing like tiny fists pressing against the inside of her skin. This is horrible, and it makes no sense, and that makes it even more so. "We have _phones._ We have email, we have fuckin' Facebook, Twitter, whatever. You're sayin' you ain't heard from _anyone?_ "

He finally looks back at her, and this time it's more than hard, and it's more than sad. It's _dark,_ and in it she sees something she sensed in all of them but which never came into the open. More than _freaked out_. More than that. She's just been told that this is a species facing down extinction, and that alone is hard enough to process, but this…

Daryl is looking at her like he's falling into something, and all he can do is watch her recede until the blackness takes him.

"Ain't heard nothin'. Ain't been able to find no one. Everyone's gone. No one's pickin' up the phone. No one's checkin' email.

"For all we know," he says slowly, "it's just us now. For all we know, we're all that's left."

* * *

She's not sure how long the silence stretches out. She just knows that it does. The incoherent dance of the chaos below swallows time, mutilates it like the light, emits it in a profoundly different shape than the one it carried in with itself. She watches it turn and turn, swirl and spiral and roil, and she feels his hand beneath hers - because he hasn't moved it. Hasn't tried. He's sitting perfectly still, perfectly silent, his legs dangling over the sheer edge like hers and his eyes mostly hidden - as usual - in the shadow of his hair. He could be looking anywhere but she's fairly certain that he's once more looking nowhere, at nothing - that he's pulled inward and for the moment he's lost to her. In the mysterious workings of his own head and, maybe, down there with the rolling planets, the darklights and the colors that manage to be no color at all.

It _is_ beautiful. It's one of the most heart-stoppingly beautiful things she's ever seen. It's also strange beyond reckoning, and it's terrible, and he must have known that. Must have known she would see it.

He didn't bring her here just because he thought it would be a pretty view. He wanted to _show_ her something.

She could ask. But she senses that might not be the best move. Not even that he wouldn't want to tell her, but that he might not completely _know_. Not for certain.

So it's strange. It's terrible. It's also very cold; whatever was allowing her to ignore the constant freezing wind is beginning to dissipate and tremors are starting to sneak in at the edges of her muscles, her teeth biting against each other in preparation for chattering. She's literally looking down at a _doorway to another universe,_ and it feels beyond stupid to worry about something as petty as being _cold,_ but she's opening her mouth to suggest that maybe they should start heading back to… whatever she's supposed to call it, _real world_ doesn't work at all, when something bursts up from below that isn't a planet.

It rises far above the level at which the planets seem to reach before they sink out of sight. It doesn't just rise; it _soars,_ glittering like a cut gemstone in the sun even though there's no sun to make it glitter - glittering with its own light. And moving - it's not one single part, one single uniform piece like a stone. It's moving the way something moves when it's alive. It's lifting itself higher and higher above the crazed sea, moving the way something does when it has-

Beth drags in a gasp and clutches Daryl's hand as everything in her jumps into spikes like an electric jolt. She catches him jerking his head toward her, catches the startled concern on his face, but all she can really see is the awesome, monstrous creature now approaching them and only a couple hundred feet away. Wings. Eyes. Not two.

Hundreds. Hundreds of both.

Later she'll think that she could have remained there for well over an hour trying to name all the kinds of wings she could see, and not have gotten above two thirds. Goose, turkey, sparrow, starling, tanager, cardinal and jay and crow, gull, mockingbird, eagle, hawk, macaw and parrot. Peacock and hummingbird and bird of paradise. Wing upon wing upon wing, all beating, all carrying the thing upward at speeds that make her eyes water just to look at. And eyes… Human eyes, cat eyes, goat eyes, the eyes of flies and lizards, the eyes of horses and elephants, the eyes of whales. Things that aren't like any eye she's ever seen. All colors, all sizes - staring at her. In the time it takes her to take a useless breath they're all fixed on her, unblinking, and she grips Daryl's hand and scrambles backward and tries to scream. He's saying something, scrambling too; she can feel his hands on her shoulders, feel him tugging at her - the now-familiar solid wall of his chest. His arms.

It's looking at her. Looking _into her._

 _His countenance is like lightning._

"Beth!" God, it happened again. It happened _again._ He had a surprise for her and it fucked her up. Through the incoherence of her terror enough of her is rational to nearly laugh. If she wasn't clinging to him, hiding her face in the hollow of his throat, she would have a good try at breaking his fucking nose. "Beth, it's alright. It's okay, it's gone."

She doesn't pull back. He doesn't try to make her. Cautiously she lifts her head, her fingers still clenched in his cool leather, and sees only what there was before: another universe, and the endless stars above it.

"What the _fuck._ "

"Angel," he says softly, and she snaps her attention back to him, far enough to see his face.

" _What?_ "

"Seraph," he amends. "Yeah, like the ones in the Bible. Sorta." He's looking away, away at where it was, and there's something almost wistful in both his voice and his eyes. "Ain't come around our world in a while. They usually stay here. Places like this." He pauses. " _Between._ "

"That's." She gulps air, spit, and something escapes her that's acres away from being a laugh. "That's _not_ what they looked like in Sunday School."

"Why you think they're always tellin' people to quit bein' afraid when they show up?" The corner of his mouth quirks, a ghost of wry amusement, and she punches his shoulder. Not hard. Not trying to hurt. She just…

She needs to do something.

Anyway, he takes it placidly and without any sign of discomfort, and she's fine with that. Fine as far as she's capable of being fine with anything. Suddenly she's exhausted, cold, and it's so beautiful here and she was happy sitting in it with him, _happy,_ whatever else they were talking about, but she's sat on the edge of the world and she's been pierced by the gaze of an angel, and now she thinks about the bike and her bed and it's all she wants.

Well. No. Not all. But it'll do.

She's not thinking about the fear in him after he made her come, the fear later. Him turning away from her, so clearly aching to touch her, so clearly half paralyzed with the terror of it; she's just thinking that he's _warm,_ warm as he always is, and strong, and she doesn't feel like she's betraying anything to fall back into that and press her face into his chest.

She doesn't feel like she's betraying him.

"I wanna go home," she whispers. "It's so beautiful, I'm glad you brought me, but… Daryl, take me home."

He doesn't answer. Not right away. But his arms are around her and he squeezes her, his cheek against the top of her head. And it feels good. Just that.

It feels very close to perfect.

"Alright," he murmurs.

They leave the end of the world behind, and he leads her back through the trees and into the daylight again.

* * *

There's more silence. But like before, it's not uncomfortable silence. She's beginning to understand that few of their silences are uncomfortable anymore, that silence is a place in which they feel oddly at home together, in a way she doesn't know if she's ever felt with anyone. She doesn't have to talk, he's not expecting her to provide him with conversation, and she gets the distinct sense that he'd just as soon not talk anyway. That he's just _in_ the world, in the world in a way that she doesn't imagine many human beings can be. Simple, the way animals are, with only a few things he truly wants or needs.

Even though what's going on behind his eyes isn't simple at all. Every second she's with him, it's like she can _hear_ the hum of his mind as it races around itself.

Regardless. She's happy in the quiet. Happy and sleepy; it's barely dusk, not even six - though the clocks will roll back soon and the darkness will encroach even more - but back in the Scead she had been thinking about bed, and by the time he pulls to a stop outside her building her eyelids are weighted and she can practically hear the bed in question singing to her like a siren.

And she feels okay. All in all, relatively speaking, it's been a pretty good day.

But he catches her arm just as she's turning away from him, and she glances over her shoulder.

"What?"

"How're the stitches?"

"I- Oh." She shrugs. "They're fine. Everythin's fine."

"Probably about ready to come out. 's been a week." He cuts the engine and removes the key. "I can do it now."

As she watches him dismount the bike, she finds a fragment of energy and moves nimbly out of the path of a middle-aged couple too wrapped up in their argument to pay attention to what's in front of them. "Daryl, that's- that's really okay, you don't have to…" But she doesn't sound very convincing, even to herself, and it's because she's not trying to be. She was tired, she's tired now, and she's well aware of what a knife edge this is to tread along, but lying down with Daryl's hands moving across her skin is not the most unappealing option she's come across all day. Even if there's possibly a little discomfort involved.

But he's hesitating, one hand on the handlebar, face a mask of uncertainty. "I mean… I can. If you want. Ain't gotta be now, if you don't-"

 _We aren't talking about this._ She gazes at him, one hand on the zipper of her jacket, her head cocked. _Something happened somewhere back there and we're not talking about the stitches anymore. At least I don't think so._

 _And I think he knows it._

"You're here," she says quietly, and steps backward, nods toward the door. "Guess you might as well."

* * *

She guesses she shouldn't be surprised when the weight of what happened the last time he was here settles over them as soon as they walk into the dim room and she shrugs her jacket off, as soon as the door clicks shut behind her.

What does surprise her is that it's not totally awful.

Like last time - like no time at all passed - when she looks up and back from flicking on the light he's standing there with his hands in his pockets and scanning everything, scanning with all the intent focus of someone who's never been in this space before. It's something she now knows he does out of sheer force of habit, pure instinct, and when she turns toward him that roving focus snaps back to her and holds there.

The place is messy. There's unfolded laundry on the foot of the bed. Dirty underwear on the floor. Dishes in the sink smeared in chocolate ice cream and congealing tomato soup. A dish towel flung over the back of one of the chairs at her little card table.

And the bloodstain is still on the couch.

Maybe in another life she would have been embarrassed. Now she can't imagine what she has to be embarrassed about. Now she just gives him a faint smile and a half shrug and moves toward the bed, sinks down onto it, raises a hand and beckons him.

He goes to her without a word.

"Go on'n take your coat off," she murmurs, and he does that too, tosses it over the arm of the couch without shifting his eerie animal eyes off her. He's standing over her, dark and appearing taller than he is, and she knows he would do anything for her, that all she has to do is say the word and he's on his knees before her, but she doesn't want to. Can't imagine wanting that right now, her face uplifted to him, his hands hanging loose and slightly curled at his sides, and so close.

He doesn't look scared. He doesn't _feel_ scared.

Tracking him - his eyes, his mouth, his entire face and the way he holds his shoulders and his body - she hooks her fingers under the hem of her ratty t-shirt and pulls it over her head, lets it fall next to her boots. .

She's wearing simple cotton underneath. Simple and off-white and worn, and he's seen her breasts before, seen them _bare,_ but as his eyes darken further, sliding over her body to her side, she fights an odd and unwelcome urge to bring an arm up, cover herself. She doesn't need to. She's sure of that, sure as anything; he's never looked at her that way. Like she's something for him to take, whether or not she wants to be taken. He's a wolf but he's never looked at her like one.

But something happened, and this is not just about the stitches.

She bends, pulls off her boots, and without waiting to be told she lies down on her side, one crooked arm a pillow for her head. "First aid kit's under the bathroom sink," she says softly, and once more he goes without a word and comes back the same way with the kit in his hands; a silent attendant shadow with the eyes of a monster.

The mattress dips under his weight as he sinks down beside her, lays the kit by her thigh and opens it. He's not looking at her anymore, rummaging for the stitch scissors, but he _is;_ the pressure of his other senses trained on her, listening and the edge of his forearm brushing her hand, and all at once she's so _wet,_ heat pouring into her like that tiny graze of contact was a spark that struck a flame. She's wet, her eyes falling half closed, and she's _positive_ she sees his nostrils flare.

They're both pretending nothing is going on, and she no longer believes it's because he's trying to keep from doing something.

Or that's not all of why.

"Hold still," he says, his voice a low, smooth rumble like the passage of his hands, and he leans over her and starts to clip the stitches.

She closes her eyes. Breathes. She can feel him, his own breath along the line of her healing wound, the pads of his fingers pressing gently into her skin. She can feel his proximity, his potential weight - he was holding her down before, holding her down and kissing her as she ground herself against him. She captures her lip between her teeth, and maybe he'll think she's feeling it a little more than she should, but it's healed well and it doesn't hurt at all, and anyway he has to know. He has to.

He has to be able to scent her like a bitch in heat.

It's taking every last atom of her self-control to keep from moaning.

Then he's done. Soft clink as he places the scissors back in the kit, closes it, puts it on the bedside table by the lamp - and this is where he gets up. This is where he mumbles an excuse and doesn't spare her any additional eye contact as he snatches up his coat and makes for the door. This is where he leaves, because he's her _scyldig_ and he _belongs_ to her and he _doesn't want this to be wrong._

She rolls half onto her back and opens her eyes, and he hasn't gone anywhere.

If anything he's leaning in closer, hand braced by her shoulder, the heat of his blood blasting off him like a small sun. As usual his hair is hiding most of his eyes, but what she can see is shining, glowing green-gold that flickers when he blinks. Her light is not attractive light, and she's never found it flattering to her or really much of anything. But here, looming over her with his hard cheekbones and his angular jaw and the muscles in his bare arms sharply cut by that weird, unflattering illumination…

He's beautiful. He's as beautiful as he was falling out of the sky like a huge lupine angel, all fur and teeth and claws, snarling in defense of her. Lunging for the kill.

She pulls in a trembling breath, reaches up and trails her fingertips down that hard cheekbone, and his eyes slip closed as a ragged sigh escapes him.

She has no idea what's happening here. She has no idea of the nature of the problem, no idea what's really going on, and maybe no idea who she even is. She doesn't know anything.

Except that neither of them needs to be alone anymore. Not right now.

She doesn't want to fucking _marry_ this guy. That was then. That was the other Beth Greene, the dead one, the one who had all these ideas about a lovely church wedding and a marriage bed and candles, a handsome sweet husband, a First Time so romantic and so perfect that she would remember it forever. Now there's this Beth Greene, and she's scarred and tired and lonely and she doesn't remember what it's like to not be in pain.

And she just wants to feel good.

Maybe she wants him to feel good too. Whatever that ends up meaning for him.

"You don't have to." She traces his cheek down to his scruffy jawline. "Daryl, I… I don't want you to do anythin' if you don't want to. Please. I don't. But if you do…"

"I want to," he whispers, and he falls into her.

The first time he kissed her it was hesitant. The second time was hungry. Now he's _ravenous,_ pressing her lips apart and curling his tongue against hers, his teeth scraping her lower lip - sharp. Sharper and longer than any human's, and as he pushes himself down on top of her, pinning her with his weight, she feels it again and every part of her winds tense. That he's _not_ human. That she's with an animal, and it's not a tame one, and just because it - _he -_ would apparently do anything for her, that doesn't mean he isn't what he is.

 _Good._

Her hands practically fly upward and rake into his hair, tangling the strands around her fingers - thinking of fur, thick soft fur, the power of him when he was _fierd_ and he was holding her, and she whimpers and arches up against him and seeks for his knee with her spread legs, for _any_ friction at all, and in her mind he's _that._ A beast, over her. His claws and the points of his teeth. Ready to take her.

But he can be so soft too.

"Daryl." Carried out on a tight breath, lips against the corner of his mouth, his jaw, neck, and he lifts his chin and gives her more of his throat and she knows what he's doing. Knows it, understands.

And she parts her jaws and bites at the skin over his carotid artery, and he groans and shudders, rolls downward, and she _feels_ his cock. Hard and burning against her. Ready.

 _I can't fuck you._

"I'm a virgin," she gasps, and he twitches violently backward, eyes wide.

For an immeasurable moment they stare at each other.

"I'm a virgin too," she repeats quietly, and she reaches up, touches his face - and he doesn't flinch away. He just keeps staring. "With you… That night… I never did that either." She pauses, teeth working at her lip. It's swollen, and she realizes it's from him. He sucked at her. Bit her. He's gotten bold. "See? It's okay."

He opens his mouth. Closes it, gives her a minute shake of the head - but she doesn't think he's denying her anything, and relief is just as warm through her core as the need for him was.

"It ain't wrong." She's stroking him now, nearly petting him, her other hand curled over his bicep. "You can feel it. You can… You can _want_ things. You can have them."

More silence - silence dense with all the things he's trying to say, trying to work through, slamming into his own internal walls. She gazes up at him and watches it happening behind his eyes, and she's so fucking _horny_ she thinks she might spontaneously combust and devour him in her own flames, but she also aches for him. Because she can _see_ it.

Sometime, somewhere and somehow, someone taught him that he couldn't want things. That he couldn't have them.

"Daryl," she whispers again, and he releases a breath and ducks his head.

But she doesn't think it's because he's hiding. It doesn't feel like that. It feels like something else. And it's only for a few seconds, because then he raises it and his eyes are _glowing._

"I wanna make you come."

She moans. Can't help it. She rolls her body upward in a slow wave, the top of her thigh rubbing against his trapped cock, and she smiles when he shudders again. Smiles… And feels him smile when he takes her mouth. _I wanna make you come, Beth. I wanna see it. I wanna feel. I wanna make you come._

She lets him undress her. Not her bra - he doesn't even seem interested in that. Not because he doesn't care, she doubts that very much, but simply because all his attention is focused below her waist, pushing back on his knees to unbutton her jeans, tug the zipper down, help her wriggle out of them. His dark eyes on her, eating her up, rough hands running up her thighs to her panties and gliding across the smooth cotton before hooking under the waistband and sliding them down.

She pushes up on one elbow, watches him. She's a mess inside, a wet, whimpering mess that barely remembers how to form words, but she's still aware enough to know that she should _witness_ this, and when he slows down so much, eases the fabric down her hips and reveals her mound and her bush centimeter by centimeter, she knows why. Knows, and has no idea how to articulate it. Even to herself. Except that this is special.

This _matters._

His hands are shaking by the time her panties are at mid-thigh, and he's pulling more briskly, down to her knees and off one ankle. Once again he has only one point of focus, and she breathes the softest laugh as she spreads her legs and he makes a sound almost like someone collapsing into despair.

Only it's not that.

He didn't get to do this before. He didn't get to really _see._ Now he's kneeling between her legs and gazing at her cunt like it's the most extraordinary thing he's ever seen.

This man who's twice her age, and who isn't a man at all.

She smiles. She figures she can tease him, even if just a little. This doesn't have to be some kind of sacrament. She would prefer he not treat it like that; she can handle a lot of weirdness but that might actually be crossing a line. "You need me to explain anythin'?"

He raises his eyes and gives her a Look. "I kinda do know the basics."

"So go ahead," she murmurs, and she's brazen, she's so fucking _brazen_ , it's horrifying and it's so fucking _great,_ as she reaches between her legs and presses her lips apart with her fingers. "You can touch me." The edge of her thumb grazes her clit and she trembles, a high _mmm_ caught in her throat. "You can do whatever you want."

Her eyes have fallen closed; with an effort she opens them and focuses on him, his face - his rapt face. Fascinated.

All he sees is her.

"You gotta tell me," he breathes, and flicks his eyes up to her once more. "You gotta tell me if- if I do somethin' wrong. Somethin' you don't like."

"I will."

" _Promise_ me."

"I will," she repeats, softer, her hand dropping loosely away. That he wants that. Cares that much. That he would be worried, even potentially. That he might accidentally fuck up.

That he might accidentally displease her.

She could hurt him. She could hurt him so badly, and she could hurt him without even meaning to.

"I promise," she sighs, and sighs louder when he touches her.

He leans in, close, so hot on her skin, watching the progress of his own exploration. Because he's _exploring_ her. Maybe he wants to make her come - he does, she can practically feel the need for it forcing its way through his pores - but this is something too: learning her. Petting her bush, combing through the curls. Single fingertip circling her outer lips, so light, from the very bottom where it curves into the cheeks of her ass all the way to the apex above her clit, nudging them aside with exquisite care. Slipping into the dip before where her inner lips bloom, pinching them with the barest pressure, tugging with force to match. Parting them the way she did, trailing down to her entrance, thick finger pressing.

His stunned gasp when he presses into her. His and hers, hers more of a whine, and she feels him freeze - like he's scared he's taken a bad step.

"It's fine," she stutters. "It's- it's fine, I'm, it's-"

"I know." His voice - so quiet. Strange. There's something about it, a new roughness, something she's never heard before, and it catches her, almost draws her out of the sweet haze into which she's falling- But then he's deeper in her, deeper and curving slightly upward, and she keens through her teeth and grips the sheets and tries not to buck her hips. Keeps herself still. For him. For him, so he can take whatever he wants from this, from her.

" _Gyden,_ you're so fuckin' _wet_."

 _It's you,_ she thinks - maybe actually says, because he lets out a dense groan, and again that roughness is there, and it's like something that isn't fully _in_ him, instead something _around_ him, and she doesn't understand.

And she doesn't want to.

Because he's touching her clit with his other hand, a single fingertip, circling and pressing and circling again, and he's not touching her like a man who has no idea what he's doing. Not at all. He's still exploring, still moving with that slow fascination, but he's also moving with purpose now, moving like he remembers what she showed him and can intuit the rest. Finger in her, finger teasing her, working her into a gradual rhythm with both hands and his breath coming so strained and ragged that it's almost an echo of her moans.

 _An echo._

"You're so beautiful," he whispers, and she twists her shoulders off the bed and braces herself up and stares down at him, and he's not looking up at her. He's watching himself, watching what he's doing to her, a small and sweet and completely unselfconscious smile curling his mouth.

"Daryl-"

Her voice is thin, strangled, her arms quivering with the effort of holding herself upright, and he doesn't even seem to have heard her. He's lost in her. "Beautiful," he says again, head tilted at an angle that looks almost musing as he spirals two slick fingers around her clit, and the pleasure that pulses up through her spine knocks her flat on her back again, her fingers clutching mindlessly at anything they can grasp. Sheets. Her own hair. Her tits, her nipples, pinching through her bra and letting loose a helpless cry as he starts to fuck her.

She's imagined him taking her with her ass in the air, taking her like a bitch, like a _she-wolf,_ wild and snarling, and so big and so hard he threatens to split her in two. And she's imagined him like a man, like he was, fingers coaxing her up and up and mouth sealed over hers to swallow her shriek as he fucks her climax out of her in a hot, wet gush. She's imagined those things, and they've even felt real.

Nothing like this. Ever.

She's almost writhing, rolling her head from side to side, and after a few seconds she hears him over her own sobbing and the slurping of her drenched pussy as he pumps his finger into her: he's moaning with her, the exact same rhythm, nearly matching her sobs - that roughness. The same. Not inside himself.

 _Beyond._

She has no idea from where she gets the strength to push herself up again but she does, one hand still clamped over her breast, and she manages to focus… And his face.

His _face._

He's not touching himself. Both his hands are on her, in her, thrusting her forward at a speed that dizzies her. But his face is pleasure-soaked, something almost like pain, his teeth bared and his long incisors gleaming, and he doesn't look even _remotely_ human. Arms and legs and skin, face, sure - it's all there. But it's not. This is a _creature_ between her legs, teeth and claws and so hungry for her, and every thrust of his finger looks like it's sending him up with her.

Sending him up, and when he gets there, when he joins her…

"Daryl." She sounds almost panicked. She _is_ almost panicked. By nothing. By everything. " _Daryl,_ I'm gonna- oh-oh my God. Oh my _God,_ oh my- oh-oh- _ohhfuckDARYL-_ "

No one lives downstairs. She doesn't give a fuck about anyone else in the neighborhood. She's never really put all _that_ much effort into muffling her noise when she comes, not when it doesn't suit her to, and now she throws her head back and _screams,_ screams the words out of her, feels something scrape in her throat-

And he's there. Still kneeling there, moving, fucking her and stroking her through it, but all over again she sees him and he's trembling, _shaking,_ his body launching itself into a deep convulsion as he cries out with her. Maybe her name. Maybe not.

Maybe it's one thing that truly _doesn't_ matter.

 _He's coming,_ a tiny lucid part of her thinks. _Oh my God, he's coming too._

Then she's falling, crashing back into the mattress with all her muscle tension dissipating like smoke, staring blindly and unblinkingly at the ceiling. Feeling his weight as he collapses onto her, his head pillowed low on her belly. Heat of his panting. His hands, sticky fingers trailing her own juices over her skin. His lips moving.

 _So beautiful._

He's opened up his own Scead inside her head. She slips into it without any resistance, and it closes behind her.


	21. drag my teeth across your chest

**Note:** There is a good bit of new vocab here. Well... There's some. I've updated the glossary accordingly: dynamicsymmetry dot tumblr dot com/post/129733980656/howl-a-guide

* * *

 **Chapter 21: drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart**

She stirs. She blinks into the barred light drifting in through the window, sighs, settles herself into the hollow he's made of his body. She has no idea when, but at some point someone turned off the lamp and at some other point he slid up the bed and lined himself behind her, circled an arm around her waist and tugged her in against his chest. He's holding her like that now, face buried in her hair, and she can feel the tidal rise and fall of him against her back as he breathes.

He's awake. She doesn't have to turn over and see his face to know. Relaxed, loose, but run through with a taut thread of awareness, something along which she could almost trail a finger.

Strong and solid in the dark, one leg between hers, the complexly inhuman smell of him - so familiar. Comfortable. He's not on the couch. He's not curled at the foot of her bed, nose to tail. He's _here._

He hasn't left her.

Moving slow, feeling as if her arm doesn't entirely belong to her and it's being guided by the same inexorability that often marks a dream, she reaches up and covers his hand where it rests over her ribs and just below the band of her bra, carefully avoiding the cut.

He lets out a breath - not exactly a sigh. There's no ambiguity in it. She can read it as clearly as if he was speaking. Telling her. Maybe he is, giving her this and trusting that she'll know. She'll feel. For now, finally, he's not hiding from her. Or at least, he's not hiding this part of himself. He's not trying to protect himself, or her.

He's happy.

And that's when she knows she is too.

It's an alien feeling, this thick sweetness blooming in her chest, expanding like the birth of a sun. She forgot, she thinks, squeezing his hand and interweaving their fingers when he spreads his own to make room for her. She forgot what it's like, being happy - uncomplicatedly. She's been something like happy with him before now, riding with him and fitted against his back, walking with him through the wastelands, even sitting with him at the end of the world. Something she identified as near happiness, the same species. But this is the real thing. Purebred. She smiles.

Pedigreed.

Naked from the waist down, warm and sticky between her thighs, and she can smell herself on him too, mingling with the warm earthy scent he carries with himself everywhere he goes. She knows that if she pulled his fingers into her mouth she would taste her own pussy, the orgasm he drew out of her.

Which she likes.

So she does. Uses their threaded fingers to tug him away from her, and ignoring his sudden tension - knowing that it means he's abruptly nervous that he's done something wrong, and it might take a long time to cure him of that assuming it's even possible - she lifts his hand, presses his fingertips against her lips, opens to him. Invites him inside with slow strokes of her tongue.

Inside her in both places now. She likes that too.

He moans softly, and tenses in a way she gathers has nothing to do with fear - confirmed when he slides two fingers deeper, lying heavy over her tongue, and maybe he came not all that long ago, or she's pretty certain about that, but she can feel the hardening bulge at his crotch, nudging against the curve of her ass.

 _I can't fuck you._

Would he let her do anything at all to him? Even just get her hand on him? Give him what he gave her?

More?

Maybe she's a goddamn virgin, at least sort of, but the last couple of months of her entertainment life have consisted - to a not-insignificant degree - of shitty porn. She's well aware that it's shitty porn, that hardly any of it is an image to actually base anything on _,_ but it's still been enough to educate her to a great extent about the things two - or more - participants can do to and with each other that don't involve what most people would consider _real sex_.

 _Real_. Isn't that funny. She's pretty sure what they just did wouldn't count by that rubric.

Even though it blew her fucking mind apart.

She closes her eyes and swirls her tongue against the rough pads of his fingers, tastes her sweet-salt, hint of bitter, the sharper salt of his own sweat. She sucks gently and he release another moan, pushes deeper, and even held awkwardly on her side she finds herself spreading her legs all over again.

She has no idea what time it is. She can't see the clock, can't reach her phone. The light forcing its way through the bars across the window is supremely unhelpful. But it doesn't matter, because tomorrow she doesn't work until late, and if Daryl Dixon want to make her come again, he's more than welcome.

And then he's nuzzling her, the nape of her neck. _Nosing_ at her. Inhaling, scenting her, and all in a bright rush she understands that now she could tell him to change. Or she could _ask_ him to, and he almost certainly would. To please her. He would almost definitely even _enjoy_ it. Change, and even if she couldn't fuck him, even if he wouldn't fuck her, she could still touch him. Be touched. Run her fingers through that thick fur. Feel his teeth on her neck. Smell the musk of how much he wants her, because he does. However much he's still trying not to.

If he even really is.

She could get her hands around that enormous cock - it would have to be, he's so big in every other way when he's like that - and stroke him, oh God, maybe even lick him, until he comes in hot pulses all over her fists.

She shudders and he feels it. She knows; he shudders too, and once again there's something about the quality of it. That same looseness. Pleasure-drenched weakness.

Everything's changed now.

She slips his fingers free of her and gives him her own nuzzle, butting her cheek against the edge of his palm. She's seem them doing this, his cyne. Knows a little of the language now. She bit his throat.

"Beth," he murmurs, and she smiles against his knuckles and rolls over to face him, hands braced on his chest. His beast heart thuds under and against her, and while him merely being alive perhaps shouldn't take on any special significance right now, it does.

"You came," she says softly, and butts her forehead against his collarbone - again, that language of their bodies that she's beginning to understand - and he combs a hand into her hair. "When I did."

He says nothing. He just nods. His other hand has settled on her hip and is moving slowly, scraping her with his blunt nails. Not scratching, but it could become that. Claws. Pinning her to the bed, and she could snake an arm down and cup him like she did that first night, maybe feel the damp patch his come soaked into his pants - assuming there's one to feel.

She wants to.

"How?"

Very slight twitch of his shoulder that he probably means to be a shrug, and she doesn't for a second buy it. And suddenly she's willing to do it when it comes to this. She'll be gentle with him, she'll be fair, but if she can command him…

Her hand splays against his chest, pushes against him. "Tell me how."

His eyes widen - they flash brighter in a stray scatter of light from the window. His lips part, breath caught between them, and he shudders, and from its depth and the way it runs through him she can tell that it's not like the pleasure he feels when he knows he's pleased her.

Except maybe it's also not so far from that.

Maybe some part of him likes it when she does this. Commands him. Takes her power and holds it to his throat like her teeth.

"I can feel you," he whispers. "When you're… Sad. Happy. Anythin' strong. Not all the time, but…"

"You… What you were doin'." Her whisper is no louder than his - if anything it's softer, little more than an exhalation. "To me. You _felt_ that?"

"At the end, yeah." He hesitates, and she arches her back and her neck, looks up and studies him. He's almost looking at her, but also away at the rows of light streaming onto the floor, the gleam of silver nearby, the bloodstain on the couch, almost black.

Light, silver, blood.

She knelt in that light and she begged her own hallucination of him to take her. Presented herself, all wet and shameless, spreading the fat lips of her pussy with dripping fingers. Aching for him to be _in_ her, _fill_ her, rip her _open_. Not really, not like that, because she looks at this monster and she knows he won't hurt her. But that _big_ \- her ass in the air and her fingers opening her cunt wide for him, and now he's _here,_ so warm and solid and holding her, and she made him come even if she never laid a finger on his cock.

She can give him pleasure this way too.

She _should_.

"Is that…" She swallows. These lines of questioning still feel somewhat like minefields, and minefields in terrain of which she's still unsure. Maybe he's not hiding that he wants this, maybe he's not hiding that he's happy, but she thinks about the Dwolma and the seething darklight, endlessly complex and endlessly in flux, and she wonders about the reasons he had for showing it to her.

Because there were more than the obvious. Of course.

He grunts, possibly urging her to go on - in his way - and she takes a breath and does. Even though, now that she thinks about it, she figures it's probably an answer she's already gotten.

"Is that something that… happens?"

He merely looks at her, eyes polished river stones. His hand has stilled at her hip, and stilled at a point where his fingers are slightly hooked, nails against her skin. His other hand in her hair too, strands tangled around his fingers, and he was twisting them idly. Now he's pulling. She feels the harbinger of a sting.

"None of this ever happened before," he murmurs - voice taut as a muscle, and every syllable rolls out of his mouth like gravel. "It _doesn't_ happen."

"Because you can't mate with…"

He nods. He doesn't release her hair, and he doesn't remove his hand, and she doesn't want to tell him to. He would. He may not even know what he's doing. But she doesn't want to.

The happiness isn't gone. None of what she was feeling is gone. It's all still there, settled over them and tucked around all they're corners. At least for the moment she doesn't feel any anxiety in him. She doesn't feel any rising in herself.

This is just so fucking complicated.

"Beth," he whispers, and his fingers loosen in her hair. She can only see his features in crags, in ridges and peaks, and his mouth is a subtly twisted line working and working at itself. Trying. Trying to do _something._ Trying for _her._ "This… It…" His face twists and he folds into her, tips his forehead against hers, and somehow it's more than when he had his finger in her, more then when he watched her with that awed look in his eyes and called her beautiful.

She lays a hand against his cheek, stubble prickling the heart of her palm. He's on fire, somehow hotter than she had felt; she's mostly naked and he's fully clothed but that shouldn't make so much of a difference. Not _this_ much.

"You can tell me."

The corner of his mouth twitches into a thin smile. "You tellin' me to?"

He means it. But he also doesn't. And that's good. She shakes her head, fingers traveling up past his cheekbone to his temple. "You can. It's alright." Then, though she's not sure why this should make any kind of difference, "I'm not afraid."

He doesn't really laugh. It's the dry bones of one, a puff of air against her throat, and the worst part of it is that when he presses closer, slides his hand through her hair to cup the back of her head, it's _still_ there. How happy he is. How happy she's made him. As if his chest was cracked and it's pouring out of him like blood, staining her.

"You should be."

"Tough shit."

Now his laugh is real - and there's an undercurrent of what might actually be relief. Relief… And amusement. Wry. Not directed at her, she's positive. "Should've been one of us. We coulda used you."

"I'm here now," she says softly - she angles her head and her chin and her lips brush his as she speaks, and another one of those deep shivers rolls through him - but again not the pleasure of knowing he's pleased her. She can feel that too. She can feel inside a _lot_ of him, she realizes all at once, and it's not that he's bad at hiding his feelings. He's not _good_ at it… But it's like she knows him the way you know someone you've known your whole life. Every waking second. Every breath, shift in tone, gesture and movement. Sure, a lot of the time she's guessing. But she's guessing less and less.

And those guesses are better and better.

 _It's getting stronger_.

He shivers and his body wrenches at itself, seeming to simultaneously try to cringe away and burrow against her, and she feels it in the tightness of his breath. That heat. The way his scent shifts, darkens. Leather and sweat, that bright thread of blood that always lingers around him, but the _wolf_ , the wolf bigger and harder, the way eyes in the dark must smell, bared teeth and fully extended claws. Running through the night has a smell, the moon has a smell, her _cunt_ has a smell, and it's all there in him. Sighing through his pores.

 _Want_.

Not just to make her feel good.

"We mate for life," he says. He doesn't murmur. He doesn't whisper. He says it, and before she even asks, the flat quality of his voice tells her everything she needs to know.

"Oh."

She doesn't move. Neither does he. The dark turns around them like the world under them, and she imagines unseen stars sliding across the sky, dragging on toward dawn.

"I want you." She has no certain sense of how much later. A while. His tone is less flat; there's more of an edge in it now. Strain on the back end of the words. "I _want_ you and I got no idea why. I got no idea where it's comin' from. Could be Scyld. Could be somethin' else. I need to know, you understand? _I need to know._ "

"This is why you can't fuck me," she says quietly. "Isn't it?"

He nods, narrow wolf eyes squeezed shut. He doesn't want to tell her more, thus much was an effort, and anyway she doesn't need the details. She does _want_ them, she's aware of the fact that they might be good to have, but she doesn't need them to understand now. If he does…

"Ain't just fuckin'. Ain't just kids. It's more. Somethin' there ain't no goin' back from. You don't even know all of it yet. You don't know the worst parts." He frames her face with his burning hands and tugs her head gently back, fixes her eyes with his, and once again what she sees there is nothing human. All animal.

An animal who might be more human than anyone she's ever met.

"I gotta protect you. You get it? It's what I do. It's what I'm _for._ So I can't." He loosens all at once, head sagging against the pillow, hands lax against the sides of her throat. Somewhat ironically, she notes, as if he's preparing to choke her. But his hands are so gentle. If they squeezed at all, they would be so careful with her. She would be so safe. "I won't."

Him not fucking her is protecting her. It should be easier to understand than it is. Should be much, much easier. Self-evident, even.

 _No going back._

But there already isn't any going back, she wants to say. They passed that point a long time ago. Only a little over a week, sure, but what the fuck does time even _mean,_ when the meaning of everything else is melting and guttering. In its own wax like the last of a candle? There wasn't any going back long before he got his goddamn finger in her pussy, and apparently he can't think ahead, and she doesn't know what it would be like even if he did, what country he would be surveying. The possibilities arrayed before him like fields, rivers, forests. But right now there's him, his hands on her, his entire body both crowding back and surging forward to devour her.

"You want to," she breathes, and it's not a question. For the moment, she's done asking questions, and this is yet another thing that she knows. Not just _I want you._ That could mean anything.

He wants _that._ Her. Bent down and raised high and open, wet, _ready_ for him. He wants that, and when she says it he shudders so hard it's almost a convulsion, and she shudders with him, gripping him, nails digging into his bicep and her other raking into his hair as she seals her mouth over his and _bites._ He whines and tumbles into wave after wave of trembling, and she doesn't let him go.

She could _make_ him. She could make him give this to her. What she's been starving for since the beginning. She could make him, and she would be giving him permission to do what he wants.

It would be so great to believe it could ever be that simple.

"I don't care," she whispers against his mouth. Her eyes are open but he's obscuring all the light; she's lost in the dark of him. "I don't need that. I just want you. I don't want you to stop." She slides her hand down his arm, fingers tracing lines of muscle, snaking between them and between his legs, and he jerks, whines again - but doesn't pull away. The fabric under her palm is warm and slightly damp, and as she curls over his length he _flexes_ , as if he's straining to get at her.

"Don't stop." She has no idea whether or not she's commanding him. No idea, and it probably makes no difference. Probably never could have. "You don't have to fuck me. Just please… Daryl, don't stop."

"Beth…"

"I wanna feel you." The sound that tears out of him is strangled, _frightened_ \- she's fucking sure of it - and she strokes him, passes her hand slowly through his hair as she kisses the corner of his mouth. "You don't have to be scared of it. You don't have to be scared of me. You can feel good, you can…" Heat is flooding into her core, dense and slow as magma. But it has nothing to do with her pussy. It's him, it's all him, and his eyes like the Dwolma, the way he's holding her, gentle with her even as half of him must want to rip her apart with how much he needs her, and what she's seen in him, felt pressed against her, shivering like his fear - that he doesn't think he can. He doesn't think he can feel good. Not _through_ himself, _for_ himself.

As if he's somehow unworthy of it.

 _What happened?_

 _Who did this to you?_

"I'm not tellin' you. Not if you don't want to." Scattering kisses over his cheeks, his jaw, and he moans and finds her hip with his hand - heavy and feels bigger than it was, and she doesn't think he's _changing_ but she's suddenly certain that if she looked down she would see something more like a paw. "Please don't let me do that, Daryl. But God, you made me feel so _good,_ I just want to…"

But he's rocking into her hand, rubbing himself against the heel of her palm, and there's nothing practiced about this. Nothing smooth. He's as clumsy as a fucking teenager, clumsy and jittering on the edge of frantic as Jimmy ever was even in their more innocent moments, gasping against her temple and already come in his pants once - and she never needed anything else. Never wanted it. Not even in her perfect little girl fantasies of a perfect First Time - because of course everything First would happen all at once and there wouldn't really be many options. She doesn't need anyone experienced to take her hands and put them where they need to be, guide her into it.

She's a mess. So is he. She's almost laughing as she unbuckles his belt, gets his fly down - and pauses, fingers grazing along the teeth of the zipper.

He's staring at her. Green-gold mirrors. Lips parted; the points of his teeth, skin gleaming with sweat.

She swallows, passes her tongue across her bottom lip. He doesn't look terrified anymore.

There might not be any words in any language to describe how he looks right now.

"Can I?" She swallows again. She can feel his heat against her knuckles, can practically feel the pound of his blood. Pounding into the surface of his skin, one more part of him ripping itself to pieces to reach her. "You can say no. I promise, you can. It's okay."

He doesn't answer. He just stares at her. A police cruiser warbles by outside and a splash of blended light sweeps over his face, making him look even less human than he already does - his gleaming teeth, mirror eyes, hair thrown across his sharp-boned features. His body has completely lost the distinction between boneless and coiled tight, and that's when she realizes that he _is_ changing, or is so close to it, struggling with it, trying to keep himself confined inside his own skin.

Trying to remain what he's not. For her.

She leans in and ghosts her lips against his as her fingers trail down his zipper. "It's all right." _Whatever you've been taught, whoever taught it to you, it was a fucking lie._ "You can have it. Daryl… You can give me the wolf."

She doesn't know where the words come from, what they even really mean, but she says them and he snarls, spasms, and as her hand is forced into his pants by the thrust of his own hips she thinks of Eostre, Eostre and her knowing little smile, and Daryl hooking a powerful arm around her and dragging her back from the insane lust of those moments and how funny, how fucking _hilarious_ it is now that it was him pulling her away.

Pulling her into himself.

He grips her head with both hands and kisses her so hard his teeth cut into her lips as he rolls forward again, sliding his length along her groping fingers. She tastes her own sweet blood, collects it onto her tongue and gives it to him as she wriggles her fingers into his shorts - and their broken sounds and their stillness come at the same time, rigid and flowing against each other.

His cock. She's just holding it, resting it in her hand; he's so hot and that's not a surprise, but stretched over his shaft the skin is so _soft,_ nearly silky, and she runs her thumb wonderingly along it, along the snaking meander of a raised vein - startled when he twitches and hisses her name.

She fumbles between them with her free hand, shoves at his waistband. "Change for me," she murmurs, leaning back enough to look at him, and all at once everything is gentle again.

She's telling him. But she's also asking him. And he'll know it.

"You got to see me." She smiles at him; she's unsure of how much of her he can even make out like this, her head turned away from the window, but the smile is in her voice, and he has to be able to feel it when she kisses his throat. "Can I see you?"

There are a number of things that might happen here. He might just say no. He might freak out and say no. He might surprise her beyond her capacity to be surprised and say _yeah, sure, absolutely_. He might drag himself away from her, zip himself up and stumble for the door. None of them would surprise her. None of them would be anywhere in the vicinity of _unexpected_.

What he does is look at her for a long moment, motionless in the dimness, until he seems to be both sinking into and emerging from it - like he has been many times before now, solidified shadow. Every line of him both clear and shifting. In between. Liminal.

A werewolf in her bed, lying on his side with his cock in her hand, stroking his fingertips across her face.

"I can't fuck you," he repeats, so soft, gentle - so _sad._ His animal eyes boring into hers. _I'm sorry._ "But I want… Beth, you swear you want that?"

Because of course he has to be sure.

All those nights on her hands and knees. _And her first thought was that he was beautiful._

"Give me the wolf," she whispers, and he curls away from her and starts to change.

She pushes up on one elbow to watch him, maneuvers her shoulders out of the way of the window's light so it all falls over his body, so it catches every breaking and resetting bone, and her hand nestles between her thighs and teases her clit in light little circles as his clothes melt into him and the glossy fur flows across his bare skin like a black river overflowing its banks. His snout, muzzle, lips wrinkled back to reveal his teeth, his enormous hands, _paws_ , the weirdly graceful curve of his hind legs and his full tail, the muscle rippling through his arms and shoulders. He rolls onto his back and arches in a single sensuous wave, paw-hands flexing and his sickle claws rending the air, and his fur is like the night gone liquid, his literally monstrous cock jutting up glistening and bobbing slowly as he breathes.

And he had the audacity to call _her_ beautiful.

 _Daryl._

She reaches for him as he rolls back toward her, and it's as if it lunges down and rams up through her diaphragm, ripping its way into her ribcage, the sheer enormity of it - of him. _Him._ His softness as she runs her hand down his side, hooks her leg over his thigh and levers herself in, her pussy slicking the fur of his knee. She isn't thinking about her own body at all, at least not in terms of disparate parts - nothing is disparate. Nothing is separate. She feels the bright itch of one of the points of his claws scratching up her spine, his teeth bare against her jaw, the musky animal smell of him, his hoarse breathing, the way he folds himself completely over her when he curls his arms around her and gathers her against him, the thunder of his heart, wet flicker of his tongue against her collarbone.

His cock harder than any flesh should ever be, pressing into her belly, thrumming.

Her hands find him. Maybe they were already there. Like this, he's far more instinct, so maybe she is too. Holding him in both hands - barely able to get one hand all the way around him - squeezing, stroking him down to the base and sliding up again. Playing with the loose skin at the head, tugging it back to reveal something even smoother and slicker, grinning into his chest as he lets out a groan unlike any sound she's ever heard pass through a human's throat.

She's not looking at him, is the thing. She's too close. She's not seeing. Except she _is,_ the clearest picture she's yet had of him, all that heat and hardness and how _sweet_ he is, dripping what she gathers is precome over her fingers, viscous and sticky and flooding her mouth with lust for it even though for all she knows it would make her gag.

She really doubts it.

This _beast_ in her bed and clutching her, trembling, fucking into her fists with shaky, shallow thrusts, his hot breath in her ear and his jaws moving, his mouth - words, she realizes, words she doesn't understand.

Only maybe she does.

 _Ah, wynn. Beth… Gydden, ormate wynn..._

"Yeah," she breathes, because all she can manage is every form of _yes_ she can think of, every part of her a smile, an affirmation, grinding herself against his leg as she jerks him, and she's sure it's clumsy and she's sure anyone else would be able to tell she's never done this before, but this is _her_ and _him_ and _who the fuck cares,_ and so what if she's not on her hands and knees, so what if he's not pounding her into the ground with his jaws snapped closed over the top of her spine. He's still taking her, letting _her_ take _him_ \- her monster growling into her hair and plunging his hand down between them to join hers. She realizes what he's doing only as his claws graze her inner thighs and then she's practically throwing her legs open for him, sobbing into his fur as the dense, rough pad of his thumb rubs over her clit in rapid circles.

 _No going back._ Her spinning mind is chanting it as she undulates her whole body against him, his cock trapped against her belly and her pussy at the mercy of his paw. She said yes, he said he wanted to, and even if this is _all_ they're doing, even if he never fucks her, there's no going back. Because she could straddle him and squeeze him between her thighs and bounce, give him her hands in every way she can think of, tease and stroke and drive him wild, and she can sink down between his hind legs and _Christ,_ maybe she can't get the whole thing in but she can run her mouth up and down his shaft like a fucking popsicle, she can seize him by the ears and haul him in and _ride his fucking tongue like a dick-_

She comes like a gunshot, whipping her spine back into a bow and humping wildly against his paw, and then the blinding crash of her own pleasure is lost as he howls - _howls_ \- and she feels two hard spurts against her ribs and then a thick welling of wet heat, coating her hands and running down around her wrists and soaking the sheet beneath her.

That's all she knows, then. That the world around her is on fire and she's drowning in it; all she can taste is blood and sweat and her own come when he touches her lips, writhing against an inhuman body that clasps her and holds her down, still rutting against her. She's so wet, everything is so _wet,_ drenched in him and in herself, and she laughs and rolls her head when he grips her slippery wrists and pins her to the mattress, leans down and slowly licks her chest and belly clean.

This is more than it might have been. This is less than it could be. It's much less simple than she's making herself believe it is, at least right now. But it feels so fucking _good,_ his come literally bathing her, his tongue chasing it, the points of his teeth, the thin red lines she knows his claws are leaving. Her juices matting his fur.

Finding the side of his wolf head with one hand when he looms over her and leans in, and she frames his muzzle with her hands and licks at his tongue when he flicks it out to greet her.

He hasn't flipped her over and driven himself into her, no. He hasn't _taken_ her the way she's wanted for what feels like half a lifetime. But he's here with her, in her bed, _as he truly is._

Beautiful monster.

Later she doesn't remember much more. Drifting lights of more police cruisers. Streetlight flickering off and back on again. The way he fills the world with his size, the caress of his fur against her skin, the strange sensation of his softening cock nestled into her palm. Nosing. Nuzzling. Licking. She's as much an animal as he is. He's made her that way. In the end he was the one who gave her permission.

She's been waiting months to let go. Give in. She just didn't know it was to this.

She remembers snuggling close to him, his arms enclosing her, a quiet, satisfied rumble deep below his throat. And words. More words she's not sure she understands, but the way she'll remember it, she's saying them.

 _Beorht eoten._

His claws combing through her hair, and dawn light gray against her lids when she closes them. Him nuzzling her throat in slow presses of his brow.

 _Lufiend… Beth. Min besorg magden…_

 _Ic beon eower._

So much of Beth Greene died in that fire. Maybe so did all the greater parts of what made her human.

Maybe that's just fine.


	22. I held it in

So like I said on Tumblr, this fic was like NO SMUT, ONLY PLOT for a while, and now it appears to be making up for lost time. Which I am 100% fine with, personally.

For anyone interested, the first official episode of the Keep Singing podcast ( soundcloud dot com/user1510691) features about half an hour of answers to questions about Howl, so there might be some stuff in there that explains things you're wondering about. Or not.

Updates will probably continue to be slowish (by my standards), while I scramble around with a number of jobs and projects. But I'll keep up with it as much as I can. And in fact, not infrequently stress _increases_ my output, so.

Anyway, yes. Thank you as always for reading.

* * *

 **Chapter 22: I held it in but now it seems you've set it running free**

She rolls over into an empty bed.

That's normal. That's expected. That's the rule, not the exception, which is why for a few moments she isn't sure why some remote but insistent part of her mind has flagged it at all. Of course she's alone. What other context should she be in, company-wise?

Then.

Eyes open. Light strikes her like an open hand and she winces, jerks her head away, and as the world swims into focus she sees the rumpled covers, the depression in the mattress that somehow doesn't _feel_ like it was caused by her, and… His scent. Just like the blanket, lingering. But more. Not like the blanket at all. Thicker. Muskier. Oddly _salty_ , and when she reaches for the sheets her fingers graze roughness. Stiffness. Like something spilled. Stained.

Her legs shift against each other and she reaches down, feels something else dried to a scale, streaked along the inside of her thigh. Low on her belly.

He didn't get all of it. When he was licking her clean.

Her breath twists, _everything_ twists, and she squeezes her eyes shut and jerks again, like the sun is hitting her from all sides. He was here. It wasn't like before. He _wanted_ it. He _meant_ to. He wanted her to know. He fell into her, _explored_ her, hands on her, finger working in her, and when she reached for him he didn't pull away. He didn't panic and run.

He _changed._

She gasps and fists the sheet and reflexively presses her hand between her legs, fingertips stroking along her lips as heat lances through her - his huge body and his power, each claw like a curved blade, his gleaming teeth, the softness of his fur under her hands and her cunt, his rough tongue swiping across her skin, massive head nuzzling at her. Butting against her shoulder. Panting strange words into the hollow of her throat. The pounding thickness and the weight of his cock cradled in her palms. Flooding his come over her hands and thighs and belly, _bathing_ her in it, so warm and slick, and once she would have been horrified by that, disgusted, even the _imagining_ of it beyond her, but she's seen too much of the world since then. Too much of its ugliness.

What she saw last night - what she _felt,_ after a year of pain- was beautiful.

But her eyes fly open, because now he's gone.

The bed is warm, the smell of him fresh. It can't have been long. But she curls onto her side, clutching at the covers and at nothing, because maybe he didn't cut and run before, but has he now? Did he wake up and see her and freak out about giving in and taking what he did? About it being _wrong?_

Even if she was begging him to take it from her.

She shoves herself up on one hand, blinking, one bra strap loose and sliding down her shoulder. Looks around as if he'll suddenly appear. Swipes tangled locks of hair away from her face. It's not just morning; it's _late_ morning, maybe close to noon. Does she work today? Is there any particular reason why she should care about that now? That he's not here is wringing at her from the inside out, knotting her gut, and it hasn't been like this before. She's been less than pleased when he's left her, but she hasn't felt his _absence_ with this kind of edge. Cutting at her. Deep. Not just want.

 _Needs him._

She buries her face in her hands.

It doesn't help anything. Her hands smell like him, dark and sharp. Like his sweat, his come. Like _sex,_ and Fucked Up Brain Jimmy mutters something about how _oh look she really does want to be boned by a dog after all_ but it's easy to ignore him.

She's not sure she gives a shit anymore anyway.

She's _starving,_ she's somehow still tired even though she knows she's slept hours, and she's been deep in it - more even than normal - but she kicks the covers back and her feet hit the floor, old boards creaking an irritatingly familiar tune as she makes her way to the bathroom. She barely gives herself a glance in the mirror, closes her eyes again into the glow of sun on whitewashed walls and tile, even if both are well on their way to not being white anymore. The sun is brighter than it should be, even for the dreamworld in which she seems to be living half her life now, and she drifts off into a haze of dull internal red as she sinks down on the toilet on total autopilot, pees, flushes, strips off her bra, gropes for the shower and cuts it on as hot as it'll go.

She doesn't want to wash him away. But she sort of does.

Under the spray she leans her forehead against the wall and wonders vaguely if she's ever going to get a chance to catch her breath. A year of moving in circles. Now she's hurtling forward, and she understands none of it, absolutely none, and _he_ doesn't appear to understand much of it either, and even here in the water-sprinkled sunlight she's spinning in the dark.

She really fucking wishes he'd stayed.

She's getting a sense of how this works. Her power. She knows she could berate him for it later. Order him to never leave her without permission. She muses over the idea, its simultaneous possibility and surreality, making a fantasy of it - not because she _wants_ it, and in the movie reel of her mind he slumps and lowers his head, wracked with unhidden pain, because she's thought about this before now: if pleasing her can make him feel so good, what will it be like for him if he _dis_ pleases her?

God, she can't do that to him. Even if he does.

She bends and blindly fumbles the shampoo bottle into her hand, squeezes a glob into her palm and begins to work it through her hair. The repetitiveness of the movement lulls her back into that red, almost womb-like fog, steam filling her with every slow inhalation, and before long she's just about dozing on her feet.

Which is why it takes her a few seconds to process it when he slips his arms around her middle and tugs her back against his chest.

She leans, unresisting - bemused. Her eyes are still closed and she concludes almost immediately that she really _is_ dozing, half slipped into something caught in the liminal territory between dream and fantasy, but he feels very real - the broadness of him, strength of his arms, skin all slick against hers and his scruff tickling her neck as he ducks his head to graze his lips against her ear.

Cock a stiff, thick length pressing into the crack of her ass.

She sighs as it rushes into her, the continuation of everything this is. He can't fuck her, no, but in her head, in the playground she's built for herself, he turns her, cups her ass with his calloused hands and lifts her lightly into the air and against him, and he slides into her as easy as anything as she hooks her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. Teeth digging into her lips and her jaw as he braces her back against the tile, makes her shudder, makes her shudder harder as he fucks her in smooth, relentless thrusts that compress the air from her lungs in echoing moans.

Her hand is dropping drowsily between her legs, because maybe none of it's real but she's built this playground up to some considerable extent and she'll take her time in it, but he covers her hand with his and weaves their fingers, and suddenly with a fine shiver she knows it _is_ real, and he hasn't left her at all.

Or if he did, he came back.

His other hand is at her hip, and there's a trembling deep in him - from his fingertips all the way to his core where it's firm against her spine - that tells her in no uncertain terms: he's nervous. Again. Maybe isn't sure he should be here, isn't sure he should be doing this, but he _wants to,_ that much she's also certain of, and she's already squeezing his hand and nodding when he murmurs, "This alright?"

Yes. It's very all right.

"Just wanted to be with you." Less than a murmur. Barely a breath. It jolts her; not that he wants to fuck her - though he absolutely must - or do anything else to her, but simply that he wants to _be with her,_ and yet another thing she doesn't doubt at all is that if she told him he couldn't do anything but this, merely hold her under the drumming of the water, he would be more than satisfied.

He would _want_ more. But not having it… He turns his head and noses at her throat, that same fundamentally lupine gesture from last night - wolf-like no matter how human he looks and feels now - and lets slip a quiet sound between a sigh and a groan, rolling his hips and gliding his shaft up and down her ass. Taking a liberty, or he might worry about that, but she rolls back to meet him, and at the same time she tugs his hand down, down over her damp, clumped curls, and he quivers with her when his fingertips ghost across her clit.

She wonders if he can already feel it. Or if that'll come later.

"I want you to," she whispers, and cranes her head, wet hair plastered to her cheek as she kisses the underside of his jaw. "If you want to. Only if you want to."

"I want to." Voice a low rumble. Closer to a growl than anything else - a gentle growl, something almost playful in it, and she doesn't attempt to control the slightly giddy smile that stretches her mouth. Whatever this is, a slavish need to please her or something more selfish, all she can think of is the delight on his face, the _rapture,_ as he stroked and fingered her into her climax, because that was real. Maybe he wanted to give her pleasure, more than anything else then, but his happiness wasn't for anyone's benefit except his own.

The world outside this bathroom doesn't exist. There's simply how fucking _good_ this feels, how sweet, as he works his hips into a steady grind, as his fingertips press down and make an unhurried little circle over her clit, and she leans more heavily against him and gives herself over to his supporting arm as she spreads her legs and grips his hand, and doesn't need to guide him at all this time.

"Daryl," she breathes, squirms, cants herself upward and chases the touch. "Please…"

"Harder?"

She nods, bites at her lip - there's a thin jab of pain and she remembers _his_ bites, his incisors cutting into her and drawing blood and her not minding. So she bites harder, sparks the pain and tastes copper, whimpers when he maneuvers his hand free from hers and trades his fingertips for the side of his thumb - clumsier but she'll take it - and nudges his middle finger between her slick lips. And he shudders again, whimpers like her when he presses into her with exquisite care - only up to what feels like the first knuckle before he stops - and she knows.

"Can you feel it?"

She could mean any number of things. But he knows too, and she moans when he nods. "Kind of."

"It's good?

He laughs. It's rich and wonderful and it vibrates into her, dancing across her ribs like piano keys. His free hand travels upward to close over her tit, her peaked little nipple nestling into the crease of his palm. "It's so fuckin' good."

"Will it happen again?" Her head sags back against his shoulder as she rocks herself between his cock and his hands, trying to drive him deeper, trying to drive him _insane,_ propelling herself in that direction all on her own. "If I come… will you? Like you did?"

"I dunno."

He gives her what she wants, pushes in, and his moan is breathy and helpless. Maybe he has her, maybe she's under his hands, but he's at her mercy, completely, and that's what _she_ feels. His weakness and how he's exulting in it, how the sounds he's drawing out of her and the things he's doing to her and doing to himself are taking him so delightfully apart, and _Christ,_ she wants him to fuck her. Just haul off and fuck bruises into her skin. So _huge,_ stretching her wide, pouring his come into her-

Where the fuck did _that_ come from?

Where everything else is coming from. Always has. Fucking her, sure, but _mating_ with her, and later she'll ponder this and what it means, but now she's falling into a rhythm, undulating against him and releasing soft _aah-aah-aah_ sounds into the water and the rising coils of steam.

So she twitches and a grunt of protest and surprised disappointment bursts out of her when he withdraws his hand, withdraws _himself,_ leaves her wobbling on her feet and alone.

She doesn't whirl - she can't - but she turns jerkily around, about to demand that he tell her why he stopped-

And he's sinking to his knees on the floor of the tub, hands tight on her hips as he raises his face to stare up at her.

She's seen him naked. But this is the first time in a while, and sure as hell first time like _this,_ and her breath catches, knots up in her throat. He's beautiful when he's what she's coming to think of as The Wolf but he's also so beautiful now, skin gleaming and strands of shining wet hair sticking to his cheeks and throat, all his corded muscle and all his scars, the flash of ink on the inside of his arm. Wide-set shoulders, the sharp and somehow graceful ridges of his collarbones, and kneeling before her like this, all of him, his parted lips, and his narrow eyes blinking as the water streams over him, and his cock jutting up dark and needy between his powerful thighs.

Her hands around it. She wants to drag him back up, drag him by the _hair,_ shove him against the wall and jerk him off like before, and not give a shit how awkward she is, how unpracticed, because he wouldn't care and anyway it's not complicated. Last night she fucking _loved_ it, his come on her skin, and she could have that again. Streaking her lower belly before the water washes it away.

But she leaves him where he is, her hands closing reflexively on themselves and uncertain what to do, and she already knows what he wants when he passes his tongue across his lips and murmurs, "I wanna lick you."

He came close last night. She had been mostly lost in the floating joy of her own aftershocks, but when he was cleaning her he was lapping within inches of her pussy, that strong animal tongue, _long_ , and part of her thought about it. On some level. Pushing him back down.

Telling him to fuck her with it.

Which he could.

Now he says he wants it, his mouth hovering so close all over again, and she stares at him and pulls in a breath, and she nods.

He moans at that, moans like she's touching him, _stroking_ him, and before she can work through any more of it he's ducking his head and pressing a slow kiss to her soaked bush, nuzzling at her, rubbing his face against her like a cat, dipping his spine and just about _burrowing_ into her, as if he wants to get his whole body inside her. Somehow her hands have found their way to his head and she frames him, palms curved against his skull, bracing herself up as she spreads her legs wider for him. The water - God, it must be cooling down but if it is she can't feel it - is flowing down over her onto his face, has to be making it difficult for him to breathe, but he doesn't seem to care; he presses his thumbs against her outer lips and parts them, and she catches a glimpse of his face, every bit as entranced as he was when he had his finger in her, and hears him gasp _holy fuck_ before he erases the last of the distance and licks long and firm from the bottom of her labia all the way to her clit and her eyes slam shut, her moan twisting into a sob.

She's imagined it. She's never felt anything like it. Not like his fingers, not like hers, not like the velvet of his fur or the pillows she's made occasional use of, not like when she was fifteen and first discovered that she could lie on her back in the tub and arrange herself under the faucet, let the hot water gush over her pussy and ripple her orgasm through her in a loose wave. He's so _soft,_ so warm and so wet in a way the water never could be, and if he held back at all with that first swipe he plunges right in, spreading her open and practically assaulting her with his mouth, no finesse or skill involved, _eating_ her, swirling his tongue over her and fluttering it against her clit, flicking, sucking at it and at her lips and _biting_ her - gently, so gently, but his teeth scrape against her and she cries out and sees stars. She's dimly aware of his name pulsing out of her, streaming like the water, mindless and all she can really hold onto as her nails hook into his scalp.

And she wants him to feel it. _Fuck,_ she wants him to feel it too, she wants him to _know,_ because she can't say it, can't scramble together the words to tell him how much he's _pleasing her_ , but while he's still gripping her with both hands, when she forces her eyes open and looks down at him she can see his hips moving like someone is touching him, thrusting into thin air, and although he's muffled by her she can hear that he's moaning too, matching her rhythm.

She doesn't want it to stop. She doesn't want it to ever stop, _ever_ fucking stop, but she can't help it; she clenches her teeth and cups the back of his head and tries her best to ride his face, _using_ him on herself like a toy and not feeling bad about it, not a single shred of guilt, because she knows he's loving every second of it, knows it for fucking _gospel,_ and she throws her head back and wails as she comes on him, into his mouth - and with the last shattered fragments of her self-control she looks down in time to see his hips snap upward, body twisting into a convulsion, and he is, _Jesus,_ he is. With her.

Not a hand laid on him. She's enough.

Gradually she loosens her hold. It comes to her, a half-formed intuition, that she might have hurt him, and she strokes her fingers absently over his head, not quite an apology, but he's sagging against her, one hand returned to her hip, mouth open against the crease of her thigh and breath hot and rough on her skin.

She's really not sure she can keep herself upright much longer. And she's also not sure he's in a state to support her like this.

She murmurs something, tugs weakly at him, and he pushes back and raises his face and gazes up at her with his lovely, inhuman eyes. And what she sees there…

She has no idea what he looks like when he's offering to his goddess the most intense form of whatever kind of worship he gives her. But she thinks that in those moments he might look a little like he does now.

Awed.

" _Beorht,_ " he whispers, and she needs no translation.

Once again, all she can do is nod.

The shower is cold, not cool but _cold,_ and she stumbles back as he groans his way to his feet on obviously stiff legs, reaches around her to cut off the water. She's about to turn, make the attempt to climb out, but he's past her, and before she can do anything or scrape together the coherence to ask him what he's doing he's snagged the towel off the back of the door and he catches her in it and lifts her into his arms. He's dripping all over the floor as he carries her out of the bathroom and toward the bed, and she laughs sleepily, head falling against his wet chest and happy enough to give in.

He didn't leave her.

Except he did. She looks up as he lays her carefully down - still wrapped in the towel - and on the table by the kitchenette she sees a bag that she recognizes from a surprisingly good and generally surprising bakery a couple of blocks away, and a couple of styrofoam cups of what she guesses might be coffee.

Jesus, he went out to get her _breakfast_.

This whole Scyld arrangement is bizarre, and she thinks she's right to be freaked out by it, but she's beginning to grasp a _lot_ of potential upsides.

She sits up as he steps back, continuing to drip, and she arches a brow as she starts to squeeze the water out of her hair. He regards her for a moment, shining in the sunlight, and yes, this is all pretty ridiculous, and he _looks_ pretty ridiculous, but he also looks so fucking _beautiful,_ and she's opening her mouth to try to find a way to tell him so when he turns and heads back to the bathroom.

And she sees them again, clearer than she did before. Those scars slashed across his back, the worst he has. Not minor injuries. Not the smaller ones that cover the rest of him. These are vicious, and whatever left them was vicious as well.

Someone hurt him. Hurt him very badly. And something about them, about the placement and the pattern…

She doesn't think he got them in a fight.

He comes back with his clothes and a towel of his own. He drops the clothes onto the sofa, still naked and rubbing idly at his hair and he moves to the table and slings the towel over his shoulder as he picks up the bag and the coffee. He returns to her and sets her cup down on the bedside table, tosses the bag at her.

"Eat up. We gotta get goin'."

She opens the bag - doughnuts, glazed in sticky chocolate and pumped full of cream, and she glances up at him. He's not looking at her, has set his own coffee down on the windowsill and is bending over the sofa and fishing in his jacket pocket for what turns out to be his cigarettes. He apparently has a very relaxed idea of modesty, at least around her. She's pretty much fine with that.

She's also curious about whether his selection of her favorite doughnuts was a lucky guess, or he somehow _knew._

She starts to stuff one of them into her mouth, issuing a muffled question around it. "Where're we goin?"

Flick of his lighter. He's standing at the window again, flame behind his thumb as he inhales, and she's guessing someone less observant might think he's standing there for the hell of it, but she can instantly tell otherwise. He's watching the street.

She wonders if he ever really _stops_ keeping watch. Even with his face buried in her pussy.

He breathes a stream of smoke at the bars, and the light dances through it. "Shane got in touch. We're meetin' him and the others in Poncey-Highland."

She halts in mid-chew. Shane _._ And _the others_. They asked Shane to get involved, but so far as she knows that request didn't extend to the rest of the pack.

Which could mean… Things.

She swallows. "Why?"

"Gotta go see a muse."

Things are back to making no sense. That's actually almost comforting now. She reaches for her coffee. "For what?"

He looks at her sidelong, and she's not totally sure whether or not he's smiling, and if he _is_ smiling she's not totally sure she likes the look of it. It's not a cheerful smile.

It's thin. Grim.

"An oracle."


	23. for peace and trust can win the day

**Chapter 23: for peace and trust can win the day**

It's a strip club.

The others are waiting for them in the parking lot when they roar up on the bike, when Daryl swings them in and alongside an ancient, boxy brick structure with a rickety metal stairway downward - a dive in the most literal sense - and a sign over the door that boasts itself as "ATLANTA'S MOST POPULAR ADULT CLUB" and promises _reasonably priced drinks_. In terms of aesthetic, it matches the sign by the parking lot entrance, which lists distinctly to one side and appears to be slowly falling apart.

It might be the brightness of the sun after a number of cloudy days, it might be that last night she gave a handjob to a wolf-man, and it might be that the world in general refuses to make any kind of sense at all anymore, but looking at them all standing there against the wall near the entrance - Carol to one side with her head down and her hands stuffed into the pockets of her coat, Michonne beside Rick with shoulders squared and arms folded, Rick himself holding the same pose of relaxed, calm alertness she recalls from the night she met him, Shane a bit further away with his hands also in his pockets and a less than pleased expression pulling at his features, and finally Glenn, pacing a little, and casting his eyes constantly around in a way that Beth might have mistaken for nervousness if she didn't see past it and identify it as a much sharper kind of alertness than Rick's - it's surreal to the point of insanity.

No, not _to the point of._ They passed that point a while ago. Sometime between the portal to another universe in her front yard and the part where she gave a handjob to a wolf-man.

She releases Daryl and climbs off the bike, shaking herself slightly as he does likewise, and as she follows him toward the rest of the pack, she notes that they're armed - and not like last time. Rick isn't in uniform - neither is Shane - but his sizable gun is on his hip, and it's paired with an equally sizable knife on the opposite side. They all have knives on their belts, in fact, and none of them are small. Shane also has a handgun, and Michonne…

Michonne has a goddamn _sword_ strapped to her back.

Daryl has brought his bow, slinging it comfortably over his shoulder and shooting her a quick look as they stop in front of the others. And maybe the way he holds the bow is comfortable, but the look isn't, and after a few seconds she thinks she's identified why. Or maybe why. Why for _her,_ anyway.

What's the deal with what they did? What they did more than once? Daryl was nervous. How many reasons does Daryl have for being nervous? She gets the distinct sense that he's not telling her everything - he as much as said so. She keeps meaning to pry it out of him, but last night - and this morning - she was the slightest bit _distracted._

Scyld. And mating, whatever that really entails. And all the things about these people she still doesn't even _kind of_ understand. All the things about everything.

She stands next to Daryl - her own knife at her hip - and she looks at them and feels their gazes moving over her in unison, and it's not comfortable. There's no hostility in those gazes, or at least none that she can detect - not even in Shane's - but they're keen.

Can they look at her and Daryl and _sense_ it? Is it perceptible to whatever special forms of perception they possess?

Then as one they move closer - to each other and to Daryl, and she steps instinctively backward - and it's not exactly like it was when they were wolves and greeting the way wolves do, but that closeness is about a lot more than proximity. While the only visible touch is with their hands and shoulders - no nosing or nuzzling or friendly nipping - it's all still there. It's happening on a level she can't see. She can _feel_ it, standing apart from them and watching as invisible bonds thicken and wind tighter.

Something like embarrassment grips her and twists at her stomach, and she gives in to the urge to look away.

She has no place in this. Maybe she and Daryl have what they have, whatever the fuck it is, but when it comes to this, she's completely outside. She shouldn't even be here for it. Her presence is somehow wrong.

Last time she felt this, too. And last time it didn't especially bother her. It didn't hurt, didn't _bite._ It was just… how it was. She's not one of them. Why should it be any different? Now she looks at them and she thinks _family_ and she looks away again.

But whatever strange and unstructured ritual was happening is over, and they're all turning back to her - so great, she's getting to experience multiple varieties of Uncomfortable today.

She doesn't truly want it, she never would have done it, but a tiny part of her wishes she had just dragged Daryl back into bed with her and commanded that he stay there.

Too late now.

Rick tilts his head, hands on his belt and his expression considering. His cool blue eyes flick from Beth to Daryl and back again. "So it looks like we're involved after all."

She nods. She's not sure what else to do. Shane is scanning her while trying to look as if he's not doing so - the only one attempting to mask his scrutiny - and she doesn't think it's any kind of duplicity. She still doesn't sense any ill-will from him. He's just being cautious with her, exceptionally so now, and maybe that makes sense, given what he might know.

Might. She has only the vaguest idea. Really not much of an idea at all.

Michonne shifts her stance. "What did Daryl tell you?"

"Not a lot." Beth pauses, takes a breath. This is fine. She can do this. She's pushed through worse. "That we're here for… a muse? And something about an oracle." A memory washes through her, dim but clear enough to make out its shape: school, junior high, and something about a project focused on mythology. "Like the Greek ones?"

Shane almost grants her a smile. "Like the Greek ones, yeah. One in specific."

Beth looks past him at the strip club - the ugly brick, the gritty industrialness of the thing - and she actually thinks of the building in which Daryl makes his den, and suddenly she understands a little more. Or she might. Because maybe there's something about the abandoned places of the world, or the ones edging toward abandonment, or even just the _old_ things, the things that have solidified their own reality through years and years of existence. When she was small and being raised on standard fairytales, enchanted places were always deep green forests, grottos, limpid pools from which emerged kingly swords. There's what Daryl showed her on the Scead-side of the Botanical Garden, but for the most part the places she's seen in Atlanta have been the ones people would dismiss as piles of broken-down shit. Ugly. Worthless.

Maybe these places are the ones that really attract magic.

"So one of 'em is here."

Not a question. That much should be self-evident. Rick nods and jerks a chin at the sunken door. Now audible, heavy bass thumps - muffled - through it. "One of 'em, yeah. Far as that goes," this time he inclines his head toward Beth, eyes flicking down to her knife, "we have reason to believe she might know somethin' that could help you."

"She might know someone who knows someone who can help you." Michonne's mouth tightens into something that doesn't quite manage to be a smile. "How to _find_ her, anyway."

"Sort of," Glenn murmurs, and says nothing else.

"Alright." Not exactly an explanation, but she'll go with it. She's been doing a lot of that lately anyway. But there's something else, and it's something that's been tweaking at her since she climbed on the back of Daryl's bike. Possibly a touchy question, but what the hell, it's not like she hasn't already hurled herself into danger in just about every way.

She looks at all of them in rapid turn. "So… I know Shane said he'd help, and I'm not complainin', I swear, but… Why're all you here too?"

"'cause." Daryl now, and she glances up at him. Without her fully noticing, he's rejoined her side, and he's standing close. Close enough for her to feel his heat. Close enough to induce a shiver she has to fight back, and again she wonders just how visible this thing is to the rest of them. "Ain't no way it's just us goin' in there. Not even us'n Shane. We need everyone. You'll see."

 _So you can't just blow my mind and explain it right fucking now?_ The words dance along the back of her tongue, but there was never any way she was really going to say it. She's beginning to suspect that part of why she's only ever getting half and quarter explanations for things is that if someone was to sit her down and really get going, they might go for hours.

Right now, they don't have hours. She sure as hell doesn't want to keep standing in this damn parking lot, with its stained, cracked pavement and its lines of rusty shit-pile cars.

It's not like where Daryl makes his den. It's not truly like that at all.

But they're going inside; she's sure of that. And that isn't a comfortable prospect either.

She sighs, nods, turns her gaze back to the rest of them. Michonne and Rick are already turning toward the entrance, followed by Shane and Glenn taking up half the rear. The other half is Carol, and while she gives Beth a small up-nod and a reasonably pleasant smile, there's something about her eyes that strikes and pierces and _peels,_ and even after she looks away Beth feels it: the sensation of someone pulling back her skin and fat and muscle and getting a look at her inner structure. Not with any malice, but simply…

She saw something. She might not know what, but she saw _something._

She and Daryl are the last, and as they start down the steps behind Carol and Glenn, she leans close and murmurs in his ear.

"Is this gonna be an issue?" She pauses a beat, then figures maybe she should specify, even though he almost certainly gets it. One thing he's made abundantly clear by now is that he's not stupid. "Us? What we're… What we've been doin'?"

Because what the fuck does she call it?

She's not sure she wants a name for it at all.

"No," he breathes, but he says it immediately - far too quickly, and he's not meeting her eyes. She looks at him sidelong; she doesn't think he's _lying,_ not exactly, not least because from everything she's seen he's not very good at lying, and she really doubts he could lie to her at all. But he's not being fully honest.

And she's starting to suspect that maybe the person he's _really_ not being fully honest with is himself.

But before she can say anything else, they've reached the bottom of the stairs and Rick is pushing the door open, moving smoothly inside and followed by the rest of the pack. Beth trails, watching them again - movement, closeness - and as she steps past the heavy black door when Daryl braces it for her, it hits her just what she's doing.

Maybe she's not one of them. One of the cyne. But she's here with them all the same. Going to a strip club with a wolfpack. She has no idea why this is happening, but. Well. She smiles. She could probably do worse.

The man next to her, his strength and his warmth and his _gentleness,_ and what she knows he can and appears to love to do with her… Yeah. She could _definitely_ do worse.

Then she passes through a soft felt curtain into the room beyond, the bass picks up, and she gets a look at what she's dealing with.

She's never actually been _in_ a strip club. Oh, sure, she's seen them in movies and on TV. Once Shawn told her - with an air both conspiratorial and teasing, because of course she wouldn't rat on him - about when he and a couple of buddies managed to get into a grimy little one a few miles out of town, just to see what they could see. She gets the general idea. And more than once a spread in one of the gas station skin mags she sometimes flips through has featured a stripper pole.

So it's not like she doesn't know _anything._ But she stops dead and sucks in a breath, her gaze shifting from Rick and Michonne's backs to the women on a stage around which runs a single long bar.

She notes the bar, its old and pitted wood, its spots of grease and scatters of peanut shells, glasses and bottles at all stages of consumption. She notes the men crowded around it - not really a _crowd,_ given that it's early afternoon, but ten or so, enough to keep it from feeling empty. It's not a small space but somehow it _feels_ small, cramped and dim, walls covered in fliers and ancient signed photos of people who might once have been celebrities, and the whole thing is illuminated primarily with neon beer signs and strings of Christmas lights coiled and draped along the ceiling over the stage.

But primarily she notices the women.

One of them is brunette and short and middle-aged - pretty, but not exactly what Beth thinks of when she thinks _stripper._ She's not thin, not toned, and from the mild sagging in her breasts Beth guesses they aren't silicone. Her body is what someone would probably call _normal,_ and do so disparagingly. She's completely naked except for a pair of ridiculously high transparent heels and a tiny g-string, the elastic of which traps a few singles against her skin. She's swaying, making absent use of the pole in a way that suggests she doesn't much favor it, half a smile pulling at her mouth - it might be intended to be sultry, but her heart clearly isn't in it. The crowd is generally enthusiastic; a few cheers and whistles audible over the bass when she bends over, one hand on the pole, and when she tugs the g-string aside and spreads the shaved outer lips of her pussy a few more dollars flutter onto the stage.

And then there's the other woman. And this woman…

Beth can't stop staring.

She's tall, muscular, somewhere between lean and curvy - not thin, not at all, and powerful. Her hair is long and so blond it's almost silver, and it cascades down her back, standing in stark contrast to the rich, glossy darkness of her skin. She's barefoot and completely naked except for a series of thick gold bangles on each wrist and twin golden chains around her ankles. The latter are strung with tiny coins that jingle when she moves, not audible over the bass but _under_ it somehow, deeper and stronger.

And when she lifts one legs and whirls - graceful and smooth and practiced, like she's been doing it forever - her gaze passes over Beth and sends Beth's belly quivering. Shuddering. Leaping.

It's not like Eostre. It's not heat pumping into her cunt, throbbing her lips and her clit. It's not a bestial need to be _fucked._ It's in her core but higher, less intense but almost too strong to resist, and her breath catches and trembles as she gropes mindlessly for Daryl's hand.

She wants to lunge onto the stage and dance with this woman. Dance with utter abandon, dance because she can't not. Because music is in her bones, knitted into her marrow. She forgot, but it's there, and she can reach it if only she tries.

She can dance and rejoice in the dancing, if she can only let go.

Daryl folds his fingers tightly through hers, and while it doesn't completely stop the rhythmic thrumming inside her, it does dull it. A little. Then she feels the weight of a hand on her shoulder and turns her head; it's Carol, standing close but not oppressively so, holding onto her - in the lightest possible sense.

But holding on.

The others have moved ahead and deeper into the club, the line of men at the bar beginning to obscure them. But neither Daryl nor Carol seem in any hurry to catch up. Whatever; Beth is totally fine with the company, and she swallows, finally managing to look away - fixing her attention on the pink sheen of a vodka bottle caught by a line of neon - and whispers, "She always do that?"

Because it doesn't take a lot of thought to come to the conclusion that this is the _muse_ they're here to see. Even if she has no idea what the fuck else that means.

If the entire cyne is here, probably nothing good.

"Somewhat." Carol, closer now. She's not a big woman, and she's not built overtly strong, but there _is_ a strength about her, deep and quiet, and Beth opens herself to it and takes what she can from it. "On days when she's not dancing, there aren't even half as many people here. But not like that." Beth feels Carol's focus on her again, studying. Coolly considering. "Whatever it was you just felt… I could be wrong, but I don't think I've ever seen that before."

"Ain't seen her all that many times anyway." Daryl's tone is rough, a bit clipped, and it nips at the edge of Beth's mind. He's not just offering an alternative; he's trying to forestall something.

And not hiding it well. Carol's sure to see through it.

If she does, she doesn't do much in the way of showing it. She gives Beth's shoulder a quick squeeze and moves to join the others; they're heading around the right side of the bar and toward what looks like an unmarked doorway in the back, barely visible in the shifting light. Beth tracks her and the rest of them, and she practically clings to Daryl's hand, because it hasn't released her, that _beat_ , and she remembers singing.

More than remembers. It's in her. It's rising, swelling in her throat, surging up through her body. It - the dancing and the song - one and the same. The music itself is flowing over the bass, swirling, spiraling, and in her mind she sees the distant soaring of that winged and tailed thing she hasn't yet dared to truly name.

Daryl is with her, and he's holding her, anchoring, but she can also feel how she might be powerful enough to hold _him,_ pull him with her.

They could dance.

"Beth." Soft in her ear, and she _feels_ rather than hears her own name - his breath warm, lips brushing the shell of her cartilage, and she shivers from that thrumming core.

It's all the same. The veil. The Scead. The Dwolma. Eostre. The knife. This. Wanting him, wanting him that much, wanting him inside her, wanting to _mate_ with him, even if she has no idea what that really means. It's all the same thing, springing from something in the very roots of her, and a voice that isn't Daryl's and isn't hers slips into her - or maybe it was there all along - and whispers from the heart of her throat.

 _You have always belonged here._

"Beth." Soft but more insistent. Her attention returns to the stage where the woman is kneeling, leaning back with her legs spread, undulating her shining body in a slow wave that makes Beth ache to look at. "Beth, c'mon. We can't stay."

He tugs at her, and when she doesn't immediately move he slides his hand up to her bicep and gives her a gentle little shake, pulling her closer to him as he starts to walk.

So she goes. Lets him take her. But on the way to the back, moving easily through the dark with the bass playing her vertebrae like a fucking piano, they pass close, and while the woman's eyes are closed, Beth can't escape the feeling that she's being watched. Watched closely.

That maybe she was seen the second she walked into the room.

No one else, though, appears to notice them at all.

* * *

She and Daryl walk through the door and into a cluttered anteroom, and into the middle of a standoff.

Not figuratively. Rick's gun is drawn. Shane's gun is drawn. Carol and Glenn's knives are unsheathed and Michonne's sword is flashing steel in her hands. The potential target of all of these weapons appears to be a small man with a pointed beard and bushy eyebrows, and odd bumps on his forehead just above the bushiness. He's unarmed, his actual arms crossed over his narrow chest, but he's flanked by two very large versions of him who are anything but. Both of them have guns, both of those guns are aimed squarely at Rick's head-

But they aren't like any guns Beth has ever seen. Not anywhere outside of a book, anyway.

Or a museum.

They look, to her, like the pistols people used to use when everything required the kind of gunpowder-loading that had to be done by hand. Pistols that pirates might carry, with slightly flared muzzles. They're plated in what appears to be silver, and silver gnarled and whorled with strange designs that almost seem to be moving.

She perceives all of this, and then Daryl is stepping ahead of her in a single rapid motion, his crossbow up and aimed in the same instant. Fast as she can blink.

Her hand flies to her knife, but that's all. _Don't be stupid._ Maggie now. _What exactly do you think you're gonna do here? Stay the hell back._

"Was hopin' to avoid unpleasantness," Rick says. His voice is smooth and calm, but the tension beneath the surface is unmistakable.

"Maybe don't come around here, then." The little man casts a barely interested glance in Daryl's direction, then reaches into the pocket of his jacket - ratty brown leather - and produces a cigar and a book of matches. "Didn't we have a _gentleman's agreement?_ Oh, but wait." He flicks the match alight with the edge of his thumbnail and puffs on the cigar. Its smell is pungent and instantaneous. "Hard to have a _gentlemen's_ _anything_ when you're dealing with a bunch of fleabag mutts."

Shane growls. More than growls; his lips curl back from his teeth, and those teeth are noticeably longer. Sharper. All of them, in fact; the one light in the room is a dirty bulb recessed into the ceiling, and it's making the entire cyne look strange. Angular. Bigger than they were. It's giving them narrow faces, flatter brows. Bright eyes. And there's something weird about the shape of the little man's legs. The shape of all three of the men, in fact. Lines that aren't quite going in the direction they should.

She doesn't think it's really the light.

She can't see Daryl's face. He's a wall of shadow in front of her, and his arms aren't shaking one bit as he holds the bow level. But she touches the small of his back and he twitches - nearly imperceptible - and releases a breath.

"If you need me to do anythin'," she whispers, "just tell me what it is."

He doesn't nod. But somehow she knows he would be, if he could. Not trying to hold her back. Not denying her, condescending. Not insisting on keeping her clear as if she's incapable of doing anything.

Nodding.

So among other things, that means he thinks he might need her.

She's not sure how she feels about that.

Rick is talking again, and his tone and hand are both as steady as Daryl's arm. "We're not lookin' to start anything. We just want to talk to Cora."

"I see." The little man taps ash onto the floor. The floor isn't much the worse for it. "Did it occur to you that she might not want to talk to _you_?"

Michonne's mouth tightens. "You don't like us. That's fine. But us and her, we parted on friendly terms. Friendly enough, anyway. Think maybe you could let her speak for herself?"

"I think you'd better let me decide how to handle my own establishment, bitch."

The man delivers the word conversationally, with no particular heat, but this time it's Rick who stiffens, who growls. It's subtle, Beth might have missed it if her gaze wasn't trained on him, but it's there and he doesn't appear to be making any effort to hold it back: long teeth slightly bared, stance slightly widened, head slightly lowered, as if he might drop the gun and simply charge.

"Rick," Michonne murmurs, her eyes never wavering, and Rick eases.

"All we want is to talk," Carol repeats. "We have a couple questions for her. That's it. We do that, we're in and out before the next shift ends."

"Or I kill you right here and Atlanta is a little cleaner."

"You do that," Daryl says softly, "you know ain't none of us makin' it outta here alive."

"Boys," said a low voice behind the man. "Let's not get stupid about this. Okay? I know we don't have any upholstery to get blood out of, but it's a pain in the ass to clean up. And you'd all be dead, so I'd have to do it myself."

The man glances over his shoulder, cigar forgotten between his fingers and a sour expression twisting his mouth. Between him and one of the bigger men steps the woman from the stage, now dressed in a simple gold robe with her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail.

She's still barefoot, and the tiny coins around her ankles still sing.

"Let me have a minute with them, Pan."

"I don't think-"

"Let. Me have. A minute." No threat in it, no sharpness, but something in the air chills all the same, and Beth draws her own conclusions: maybe this is the little man's _establishment,_ maybe this is technically one of his employees, but he's not the one with all the power here.

"A minute," he mutters, and steps aside, motioning for the other men to do the same. "Then I want 'em gone. Hear?"

"Hear," the woman echoes, the airiness in her tone suggesting that she does hear but couldn't care less. She pushes open another door behind her and stands back, beckoning. Her gold bangles flash. "C'mon. And if you wouldn't mind putting away your weapons? They make me jumpy."

They don't seem to be doing anything of the kind. But without another word from her - or from anyone - Rick holsters his gun, nods to the others, and weapons are returned to their sheaths. Daryl is the last to lower his and he does so with obvious reluctance, the muscles of his shoulders and arms still tight - and without thinking about it, without stopping to question the impulse, Beth once more touches his back. Lays her hand against him, palm flat and fingers spread.

He loosens.

 _Easy._ It doesn't even feel like it's coming from her, except it does. And this time, though she thinks it with wry amusement, she's not horrified by it. By what it probably means. _Easy, boy._

"C'mon," Rick echoes, glancing back at the rest of them, and starts forward. So there doesn't seem to be much else to do. They file in through the door, the woman follows, and it closes behind them.

* * *

Beth blinks for a few seconds, tries to scan the room, has to stop and blink some more. It's _bright_ after the low illumination of the club, and it's as though everything around them is taking the light, catching it, tossing it around like a ball. A lot of balls. For a moment it's impossible to make out anything more than brilliant blurs.

Then, as her vision clears, it comes to her that they're not in a room at all.

They're standing in the center of a wide circle of white marble pillars, the floor beneath them the same marble. Beyond the circle is a ring of thick grass the smooth green of jade, and beyond that is an equally thick line of tall pines. Beyond _that_ , so far as she can see, is total darkness.

But above them there's nothing but blue sky, and the sun pouring itself down over them, soaking the white and making it glitter faintly. All around them, unseen birds sing.

"So." The woman - _Cora,_ presumably - walks past them toward a long silver chaise lounge next to which stands a table bearing a brass pitcher and a large plate of grapes. "You need to talk to me. What about?" She sinks down onto the lounge, crosses her legs, and leans over to pick up a curved, double-armed stringed instrument. She sets it on her lap and begins to stroke her fingers across it, raising a series of softly humming notes into the air. _Lyre,_ Beth thinks, the word coming all at once. It's a lyre. "I'd make it quick. Pan's liable to get impatient, and I can't hold him off forever. He's an asshole, but he's still a god. Not that most gods _aren't,_ these days."

Rick is the first to move, starting toward her across the marble and directly followed - as before - by Shane and Michonne. Glenn glances back at the remaining three of them and shrugs, jerks his head forward. Cora's eyes follow all of them, her fingers never stilling, and the music she's drawing out of the strings is beginning to take on form and shape.

And rhythm.

Rick stops, his stance once again loose. Relaxed. "We have to find Pythia."

"Shit, really?" Cora shakes her head. "Rick, you know you shouldn't."

"We need to. We need her sight, what it can tell us."

"And you really can't get it from anywhere else? Whatever it is?" The music falters slightly and Cora sighs, head tilted to one side. "She's retired. And you know she hasn't been the same since the library burned down."

Carol crosses her arms, impatience sharpening her otherwise soft features. "That was more than two thousand years ago."

"Long time to grieve," Cora says, and there's an edge in it, curving around the consonants like the shape of the lyre. "Long time for it to eat into you. What the hell is it you need her to tell you about, anyway?"

Rick is silent for a moment, and swings his gaze from Cora to his boots and up to Shane - who, after a few seconds, gives him a tiny nod. Whatever they've decided, whatever's passed between them, it ripples out into the air, carrying weight and an odd sense of darkness, and Beth fights the urge to edge backward toward the door.

But then she glances over her shoulder, and of course the door isn't there at all. Only more pillars, more grass, more trees.

"Beth," Daryl murmurs again, his fingers at her upper arm, and she can't decipher what's behind the name or the touch and doesn't have a chance to do so. Rick is lifting a hand and waving her closer, and even before she starts to drag her reluctant feet forward, Cora's eyes are meeting her and flowing over her and widening. For the first time, Beth sees that they're pools of swirling, fathomless gray, and they're drawing her in.

They're dancing.

"Well, hello there," Cora murmurs. She's still playing the lyre, still building that graceful rhythm, and now a new part is falling into it, joining - as if a second lyre is there, a second invisible player, and something about that harmony passes through the membrane of Beth's skin and sings along her veins. "Hello there, little witch. You have no idea how good it is to see you."


	24. who am I to disagree

**Chapter 24: who am I to disagree**

Beth stares at her.

There are three levels to this. The first one is the staring, and most of her can't move past that. Beneath the staring is the persistent feeling that she should be doing more than staring, that she should _say_ or _do_ something, that she should react in some way that gives at least a vague impression that she can handle things. Handle anything. She has no idea how she's supposed to convey this, as the world continues to unfold around her like nothing just happened. But more than this is almost certainly expected of her.

And beneath all of that, under everything, is a total lack of surprise.

She knew already. Somehow. Some part of her so deeply buried that perhaps it's never seen the sun. Perhaps always buried until now. She knew already, and at last she's unearthed it and can face it squarely.

 _You have always belonged here._

So she does manage a word. Finally.

"What?"

Cora's slow gray tsunami of a gaze shifts to Rick and she arches a brow. "She doesn't know?"

"We didn't know. Weren't sure." Shane, quiet. His tone is impossible to read. "Till now. She is, then?"

Daryl. She's barely aware of the rest of them. Cora and Daryl, Daryl still with her, and it doesn't matter if he knew or not; she could turn and press herself against him, bury her face in his chest and let him enfold her, and she knows he wouldn't push her away. This is beyond weird and no, she _can't_ handle it regardless of what she knew or didn't know at heart, but he's here. And she doesn't want to be weak, but the truth is that she doesn't have the strength to resent this. Being tired. Wishing she didn't care so much anymore. About that night when her life died. About what happened.

She never really wanted to let it go until now. And she knows she can't.

No going back.

Cora laughs softly. "You think I'd make that kind of mistake? After what we went through? After how we all fucked up that bad? I never let myself forget. It's beaming out of her like sunshine." Her brow slides upward again, her focus now flowing over all of them - so at least it's somewhat diffused. "If you didn't see it-"

Glenn lifts his head, and his voice is the slightest bit tight with impatience. "Does it matter whether we did or not?"

"Might not. Probably doesn't, not now." Cora rolls a shoulder and the music stops with heavy abruptness as she sets the lyre aside. "It's interesting, though. Considering. Makes me wonder what else you aren't seeing." Michonne and Rick both stiffen, but before anyone can respond Cora lifts her hand and, in mimicry of Rick, beckons. "C'mere, little witch. Let me look at you."

Beth doesn't move. It's conscious this time. It's voluntary. It's meant. No, Cora hasn't thus far given any indication that she's actively dangerous, but every cell in Beth's body is singing that she might become so. Because she's not human either. And it's clear by now that _nothing_ is safe anymore.

And if at this point these people think she's a _witch_ , fuck knows what comes next.

But Daryl touches her shoulder again, gentle. Warmth ripples under it. _Seft, magden._ "'s alright. She won't hurt you."

A sharpness in the words - not in the least directed at her - that's easy enough to make sense of. _Better fucking not._

And then Daddy, and that's what does it. Daddy, and not the awful weight of his head in her hands but standing here with the sun washing over her, thinking not of pillars but instead of the white porch and the summer breeze. That last summer. Him standing there in the grass and looking up at her, wearing that faint smile he put on for her when she was being difficult with herself.

 _You were always going to be here, Bethy. You know that. You had some choices about some things, but not about this. God leads us down certain roads, and all we can do is walk them as best we can._

 _And anyway, it wouldn't kill you to have a little faith._

Well. She's not so sure about that.

But she steps forward. As she does, Rick and Michonne stand aside, both watching her, and when she halts and Cora reaches up and lays a cool hand against the side of her face, she doesn't flinch away.

She's shed blood in battle beside a werewolf. She's not going to be a damn coward now.

"Yeah," Cora murmurs, her eyes falling half closed and her full lips parting. "For sure. So young, too." A breeze - a summer one - whispers through the trees and around the circle, and toys with both of their hair. Voices on that breeze. Beth knows she's not imagining it.

Her eyes are slipping closed as well. Cora's touch isn't stopping at her skin, but it's not violation. This isn't something she wants to fight. Doesn't need to. Doesn't question. Probably she should, but since she walked into this place and that bass pumped into her heart, there have been parts of this she knows she can trust.

Even if the rest of it is - at _best_ \- one giant fucking question mark.

"You don't seem all that surprised," Carol murmurs from behind her - audible but distant, and she sounds as if she's speaking from high above, at the top of a staircase. A balcony. Or a well.

"Not all of us believed they were completely gone. Drya are tough to kill. You people should know that better than pretty much anyone else." An edge, there and gone just as quickly. Her thumb strokes over Beth's cheek, leaving the pleasant prickle of tiny sparks in its wake. They have a rhythm and they dance their way into her cells, and she makes them welcome. "If they knew they were going to lose - and bet your ass they did, at the end - they would've found a way to preserve _something._ Hide it from you. Hide it from everyone."

Her eyes fly open just as Beth's do, and those gray pools are no longer frightening. Beth meets them, and the image of the steadiness of Daryl's arms as he aims the bow flickers through her mind like an old movie reel. "How did you find her?"

"Found us," Rick says quietly - but there's a tension there she hasn't heard before. "Kind of." Beth glances over her shoulder in time to see him jerk his head in Daryl's direction, and Daryl - who's keeping his place at the outer rim of the circle - looks up and at him and down again, the set of his shoulders suddenly awkward. "He's her scyldig."

Cora releases a breath and drops her hands into her lap. "No shit?" The corner of her mouth curls as she regards Beth with renewed interest. "Honey, you're full of surprises."

"Seems like." Her voice is very dry in her own ears. Dry and tired in a way that has nothing to do with her body. "Kinda like to stop being surprised for a while, to be honest."

"If you just found out about this, I don't wonder." Cora cocks her head, now fully ignoring everyone except her. And in fact the rest of them _have_ faded. Not just Carol. They're all receding from the boundary of softly humming rhythm this woman throws around her, and Beth is suddenly sure - and really it couldn't be - that _Cora_ is not her name.

Close, maybe. But not the same thing at all.

"Why didn't you know?"

"No one told me."

Cora's brow knits, something unidentifiable flashing briefly behind her eyes. "How the hell didn't you figure it out on your own?"

Beth doesn't have to ask what she means. The one way she _could_ have figured it out, if no one had told her. The one hint she _did_ have in the end, the beginning of the whole fucking thing. These few signs like smacks in the face, and until now she had no idea how to read them.

"I couldn't _see._ Through the veil." She nods over her shoulder at Daryl. "Until him. Before that..." Her jaw tenses, and without her intending it, her fingers graze the hilt of her knife. "Ytend killed my family."

"Really." Cora leans back on her hands, head still cocked and her eyes flicking down to the knife, the raised foot of her crossed leg bobbing slowly in time to her own private beat. Beth glances down, caught by the movement and the jingle of Cora's anklet; her toenails, rather than gold, are lacquered in a hard silver somewhere between the shade of her eyes and her hair. "Well, that makes a whole lot of sense."

"Does it?" Michonne, but something in the last word tells Beth that she's understanding even as she says it, and Daryl speaks before its sound falls out of the air. Flat, and as weary as she feels.

"They knew. Somehow. They came for her. She was supposed to die."

All at once a hand rips into her, tearing the breath out of her, and the bright colors in the place bleed into a gray devoid of light. The points of claws lancing into her gut and twisting.

 _She was supposed to die._

Not them? Is that the conclusion she should draw? Is that what that fucking _means?_ They died because she was supposed to, and _she_ lived?

She said she needed to understand. She actually fucking _said_ that.

It takes her a few seconds to realize that she's trembling.

But Cora is talking again, past her and at the rest of them. "Couldn't be just her. If she's Drya, at least _one_ of her family was too. Bloodlines are a thing. And if she has that-" she points an elegant finger at the knife, "- _someone_ had to know _something._ "

"So why _now?_ " Sure, it makes sense - she guesses, inasmuch as anything does, and it actually kind of explains a lot - but it also doesn't help; she's still trembling, if anything trembling even worse, because she feels like a scared little girl and like she's about to throw some kind of tantrum, and like all she wants is to find that fucking door they came in through and run and run and run.

And she wants to go _home_. She wants Shawn and Maggie. She wants Mama. She wants _Daddy_.

She fucking hates everything.

"If that's been true this whole time, why now? Why did it happen now? Why not before? Why didn't it happen later? _Why?_ " She whirls on the rest of them, her hand tight around the handle of her knife and her other clenched at her side, and maybe it's wishful thinking but she would swear she actually sees Rick and Michonne and Shane take the smallest step back. "And maybe you could all start talkin' about me like I'm _actually fuckin' here?_ "

Silence. She's breathing hard; she didn't mean to, didn't even necessarily want to now that it's done and out there and hanging in the air like the odor of something rotten, but Christ, she _meant_ it. Every goddamn word. And maybe it also feels _good_ to have said it. Maybe she's breathing hard, pumping adrenaline, and liking it.

And she has no idea how to name the look on Daryl's face, but just like she'd swear she caught a step backward, she'd almost swear he's almost smiling.

"How old are you, little witch?" Cora's voice is very low, very calm, but anger is still burning a hole in Beth's gut when she turns back, and she's ready to explode again - _don't fuckin' call me that_ \- when something in Cora's eyes stops her.

This woman could be dangerous if she wants to.

This isn't a woman at all.

"Eighteen," she murmurs, the word trembling on its way out of her, and Cora nods as if this is exactly what she expected.

"If you were raised like what you _are_ \- whether or not you were in a coven - you'd be coming into the full of your power, little witch. Maybe you'd do it before this year, maybe after, and you'd have come of age when your blood first flowed, but right about now you'd be claiming your place in the world. They sensed it. They knew. That's why now."

"So why not whoever else it was in the family?" Beth glances back; Shane's arms are crossed over his chest, his head slightly cocked. "Her sister was older. Why'd she make it past that?"

Cora shrugs. "I don't know. Don't know everything. Only guessing this much." The anklet stops jingling, and her eyes narrow. "That's why you want Pythia."

"There's a lot here we need to understand." The quiet steel that's been the base of Rick's voice has faded, softened, covered over by something nearly placating. "Yeah, it's her. _She_ wants to understand." Beth turns, mouth open - and this time she really _will_ mean the words and the anger in them - but he's looking right at her. Right _at_ her, and she remembers how it was when he was talking to her that first night, how he truly did _see_ her.

"You. _You_ wanted to understand. I know. But there's more now. Ain't just about you. And I don't mean you don't _matter._ " He takes a step forward, head angled, and yes, he's apologizing even if he's not saying it. Not Cora he's aiming to placate. Not at all. "But it's bigger than you. Your family. You. Us. Him." He nods at Daryl. "The Ytend don't target people. Not _people_ , not as a rule. But this is at least twice they've gone after _you_. Probably three times. They probably ain't done. There weren't supposed to be any more Drya, but here you are."

"So you need an oracle to fill in the gaps." Cora stands, stepping past Beth with soft rhythmic chimes in her wake, and her gait itself is like dancing. "What then?"

"We don't know."

"No. Of course you don't. That's why you're looking for her." Cora looks from Rick to Beth and back again, and Beth fights a fresh urge to say _No, I'm done. I changed my mind. I don't want this anymore. I didn't know it was going to be like this, I don't_ want _it. I just want to go home._

But she doesn't have one.

Except she shifts her helpless gaze to Daryl, and what she sees there…

His hand on her shoulder, though he's feet away. This thing between them is not one-sided. It's revealing itself, filling and brightening like the moon. Sure, she can touch him, settle him like an animal - like _her_ animal - but more than once now he's held her up, even carried her in more ways than one, and if she loses sight of that, she loses sight of one of the few things she has left. She doesn't have a lot to lose, and that's not freedom. That just means she has to cling tighter.

Briefly, she closes her eyes and smells honeysuckle and pine. And the breeze is singing.

"I shouldn't get involved." Cora sounds resigned. "But if this is right, if it's what I think _you_ think it is… I don't really have a choice, do I?"

Beth draws a breath, looks, and Rick is folding his hand through Cora's, curling their fingers together. Meeting her eyes, his own pale and sharp. Taken at a glance and at a distance, cast in warm golden sun, it might look friendly. Might look like a greeting, or a deal.

She has the feeling it's something like the latter, and she trusts the instinct. But friendly? It's not actually hostile, what she senses there between them, but no. Not friendly.

No way.

Rick shakes his head. "None of us do. Not anymore. Least, I don't think so."

"Then I'll let you in. But that's all." Cora tugs her hand free and lifts it palm out into the air, as if she's delivering some kind of benediction. Minister in the church Beth hasn't been inside in almost a year now. "I'm not guiding you through. That's on you." She arches a brow. "All I'll say is you better have your pathfinder with you."

Glenn clears his throat, shifts from foot to foot, and suddenly - if that means what Beth thinks it does - some things about him make a lot more sense. His alertness. The way he scans everything, all around him, all the time. The quick nimbleness she's only today noticed in his movements. The way - and she gets it now - it feels like he's always _mapping_ things.

"Wouldn't come without a helea," Carol says dryly. "We're not idiots. Or suicidal."

"Yeah, I don't know about that." Cora closes her eyes and then her fist, hand still raised, and the air seems to crackle. It's familiar, and it's also twisting anxiety into Beth's gut, and as her hand finds her knife again and she takes a few involuntary steps in Daryl's direction, she realizes why.

A Night Gate.

Only not, because what opens doesn't look like that. It's not a smooth tear in the world, sliding open like a mouth at Cora's fingertips, and there's no brilliant night beyond it. No stars, and not a darker version of the world they're in. There's a crack and the feeling of something _slicing_ , through the air and the ground and her fucking _head_ , and the sky above them shatters from cheerful blue into a sullen and foreboding slate. The tops of the pines sweep one way and then the other, and it comes to her hard and sharp: old footage of a nuclear test, the shockwave whipping the trees forward and back in a tidal wave of dust.

It's not like that. Yet at the same time it is. Like what she imagines it might have been, to be there.

Everything is Wrong.

Cora's eyes are closed, her brow furrowed in concentration, and in front of her reality _unmakes_ itself, unwinds like the threads of a rug. Beth sucks in a breath and then a hand is on her forearm and she's clutching for it, holding on. It's big, hers small inside it - and it doesn't feel like a hand at all.

He hasn't changed. She knows, even if she can't look away from the pure white doorway opening up before her eyes. But even so, she feels the gentle prickle of claws at her wrist.

Then it's over, the sky clearing, and Cora is lowering her arm. Not exactly gasping, but not far from it, her head briefly dropping toward her chest as her shoulders rise and fall with the depth of her breath.

The doorway is wide, tall, and what's beyond it is so purely and utterly white that it hurts to look at it. It stabs pain into Beth's optic nerves, winds them around with fire. She winces, twitches her head away, and Daryl squeezes her hand again.

But it doesn't help much. Because she knows: they're going in there. They're going in there, and she has no idea how the hell she's supposed to _see_ in that awful and complete absence of color. Whatever it is. Whatever it _isn't._ Sure as fuck not the Scead.

And they apparently need a _pathfinder._

Cora steps aside and gestures to it - flourishes, as if she's producing something she's proud of, and the twist in her smile is deep and sardonic. "I'd wish you luck." The twist curls into a hook at the end. "But if you're going in there, I don't think it would help you much. So I'll just say that I hope we meet again."

Rick steps past her, Shane and Michonne close behind, but he pauses feet from the door, looking back with his hand on the butt of his gun. That same look is in his eyes - pale, cool, steely. Turned like that, gun at his hip, Beth swallows and once again thinks _Gunslinger._

And she thinks she sees why they might be following him into that white horror. _Eal_ , yes. And she's beginning to understand what that actually means. Or might mean.

Wondering what it might take to understand it even better. Wondering if she wants that.

Fuck, no. She still doesn't _want_ any of this.

Except the rough hand warm and tight around hers.

"Under better circumstances?" Rick says it like a question, though she's not sure it is one. He gives Cora a smile to match hers, glances at Michonne. " _Wacen ure edcier innan se afenleot._ "

The words drift into the air and seem to disperse directly into the breeze, and not for the first time - but maybe more than ever now - Beth notices how musical the language is. Strange, vowels and consonants flowing together in ways that sometimes manage to be almost familiar and sometimes sound like nothing she's ever heard, but always somehow only a few steps away from a song.

Except when Daryl whispers it to her in the dark, it has all the cadence and rhythm of poetry.

Cora nods and folds her hands together. Daryl is moving forward now, tugging her with him, Carol close behind. Glenn heading past, joining Rick - stepping ahead. His head is up, strides swift, his whole affect subtly changed. Like he's been waiting for something, and that something has finally arrived.

 _Helea_. Well.

" _Edcier at eard gehealdfast,_ " Cora says softly, and turns away, head down. Beth shifts her gaze away, squints and grits her teeth. The white is approaching, opening to swallow her, and she's not going to run, she's going to hold fast and not going to make herself look like a scared little girl in front of these _people_ , but every step forward is an effort, and as she watches the shapes of the others in front turn to dark silhouettes and then to black, human-form holes in the world, she wishes for that night back, with the Ytend and with _him,_ and she wishes she'd left well enough alone.

Except that was never an option. Daddy is dead but Daddy has a point. She never had a choice in this.

Which sucks. But there it is.

She's blinking rapidly, fighting the urge to winch her eyes closed and keep them that way until the light is bearable, when a hand settles on her shoulder and she's aware of Carol stepping aside, Daryl halting and halting her with him.

"Little witch," Cora murmurs, and when Beth manages to meet her gaze, it's like hands reaching into her. Like before, it's not violation. It's like there's a body _inside_ her body, and the hands of Cora's eyes are settling on those inner shoulders, bracing her, sending iron into her spine.

"Remember who you are." She leans in closer, her voice escaping her on a breath, perhaps too soft even for Daryl or Carol to hear. "They'll try to make you forget."

"Who?" But she's moving again, Carol not quite pushing her with fingertips at her back, Daryl drawing her in. God, she doesn't want to - they're making it look so easy, walking into it, and maybe they just don't _feel_ it the way she does. "Wait- _Who?_ "

But Cora is turning away again, releasing her, and before she has time to take another breath, something to back her words with, the white is devouring her, eating her alive, turning her inside out and peeling the muscle free from her skin. It's all blade-thin pain, pain like water pouring into her nose and eyes and throat and drowning her, and she's twisting in Daryl's grip, feet scrabbling at the ground, trying to scream.

And she doesn't have any breath to do that with either.

She doesn't have anything at all.


	25. our only goal will be the western shore

**Chapter 25: our only goal will be the western shore**

 _Where's- Ah, shit. Shane?_

Shane. Like a released breath: a long vowel and an end like a smooth expanse of a surface. It's a name. She knows that. Name for a person, not a thing. She has a face she can attach to it, drifting through the muddled oil spill her brain appears to have become. A slick fragment. But it doesn't matter. She can't _see_ anything, so what the fuck good is a face?

Forms, though. Hovering. Looming. Blurry, near - maybe. She's not sure. Movement and brightness. There's warmth, pressure on her arms. Someone gripping. Holding her. Holding her up?

So what's _up,_ then?

Directions are very abstract. They're concepts. They're hypotheticals. Philosophical. Much like the rest of everything at the moment, much like how all of everything always seems to have been. She could fall into a debate with herself about just how much of this is real, and always come up empty because it's not like she ever cared much about shit like this but she does know that you only debate philosophy when you can prove nothing at all.

 _You got her? Gyden, you didn't know it would_ do _that to her?_

 _How the fuck were we supposed to know? You ever done this before?_

 _She's human, Shane._

 _Rick._

 _No, she's not._

She wishes they would shut up. God, she hurts.

But whatever is under her… It feels solid. It's supporting her, not gathering her in but shaping itself to accommodate her. She's not floating away. She blinks - eyelids. The universe pops out and back in again. More voices, muffled. Someone brushing her hair back from her face. Stray strands tickle her nose.

A smell, close. She mulls over the idea of proximity. That smell… Blood. Leather. Sweat.

Wolf.

 _Magden._ He's not saying it, she's sure of that, but she hears it all the same. Like when he was carrying her up to his den. Carrying her in his arms, carrying her like she was nothing except he was carrying her like she was everything to him, so careful, so gentle, laying her down in his bed. His hands on her skin, her face - like now. His voice, so soft. Breath on her face, her neck. _Seft, magden._

Soft… No, not just his voice. The silk of thick fur against her skin. Muscle. Claws. Teeth. His hot, rough tongue tracing the lines of her collarbones, flicking up her throat. In her mouth. In his.

Safe inside her monster.

 _Min besorg magden._

"Daryl," she whispers, because that name - yes, she knows that one. That scent, those hands, and now maybe even that face, its barest outlines bending over hers, and suddenly she knows that she's lying on her back, arms and legs boneless and tingling-numb, and her head is pillowed on the slant of his knees, his fingers combing her hair away from her dry lips when she licks them.

The others… Okay, sure. She knows them. Faintly she can hear them talking. Arguing, possibly. But just now she doesn't think they matter all that much.

"You're alright," he murmurs. It's not a question, and he doesn't seem surprised. "You're fine. It was just goin' through."

 _Going through._

She blinks again. It's not white now, not that insanity of whiteness, though it's still bright and it still hurts, and she still can't focus. Sensation doesn't seep back into her extremities; it _floods_ in, and with an abruptness that startles her she lifts a hand to her face and scrubs weakly at her eyes, trying to roll to the side. Trying to sit up.

"Don't." Not Daryl. Woman. Gray hair. Calm features, what she can see; steel framework behind them. Cool fingers on her forehead, and she doesn't try to push them away. Carol. Carol has never been anything but kind to her, and Carol is kind to Daryl, and that matters. "She'll be okay. It was just a shock. Give her a minute."

Shuffling close to her; by the movement she sees out of the corners of her aching eyes, she thinks she can determine with confidence that she's dealing with feet. Legs. The cyne standing around her. Which is awkward and irritating and she hisses in air, core tensing and coiling like a spring. Even like this, her anger at the whole goddamn situation hasn't left her.

Might be good. It's been weaving through her spine, making it easier to stand.

"It was a mistake. Bringin' her." Shane again, and terse. One of the sets of legs moves away, carrying their owner with them. "Rick, you're gonna get her killed."

"She's part of this. She deserves to know."

"Fine, so we can tell her when we get back."

"Like hell." Daryl, words emerging in a low growl; lying against him like she is, they rumble into her shoulderblades. "You ain't seen her fight. She's tough. She can hold her own."

Shane releases a hard breath, too sharp to be a sigh. All exasperation, punching out of his lungs. Beth wonders if this is something she's supposed to care about, aside from being irritated. "You think she could've _fought_ her way through what just happened?"

"I think she's okay now if you just _give her a fuckin' minute._ "

"Stop."

Rick - low, tone even, sliding into the air like the edge of a blade, and they stop. It's just silence, silence all around her, all around _them,_ except for the humming of the blood in her ears and the flutter of it in her throat. And Daryl's breathing, slow and steady. He's not holding her, not exactly, but it feels like that. Feels like a lot more of him is touching a lot more of her, and when his palm makes another pass over her cheek she nuzzles instinctively into its curve.

He doesn't freeze. But she feels him go briefly tense, feels like she should know why, and doesn't.

Regardless, her eyes are beginning to recover. Beginning to work. There's not as much light as she thought - not anywhere _near_ as much. It's definitely not the brain-splitting whiteness that tore her apart. It's not _white_ at all; above her and beyond the looming shadow of Daryl's shoulders and head is a slowly churning gray sky. A flat kind of gray, none of the power and potential light of stormclouds or even clouds that merely carry rain. If what's she's looking at up there are clouds, they feel pointless. Not for water. Not for anything. They just _are._

And as she turns her head in Daryl's lap - wincing as her temples throb a few times - she sees dim shapes lurking beyond the circle the cyne is making around her, some low and squat and some tall and spindly, and she realizes that some of what she had taken for blurriness is in fact just _fog._

Or something like fog. She watches it churn, slow as the sky, and she wonders.

The wondering is not pleasant.

She licks her lips again. She still doesn't have much spit to do it with, and when she speaks her voice rasps and barely sounds like her at all. "Where are we?"

A humanoid form that she can now identify as Rick moves closer to her and drops into a crouch by her side. Her vision is pretty much back to working at full capacity, and while a lot of him is lost in shadow, she catches it when his cool eyes flick to Daryl's face for the finest sliver of a second.

Though she's not sure how to make sense of what she sees in that gaze. And she can't see Daryl's own.

" _Benescead,_ " Rick lifts a hand and touches her, once - a fingertip at the point of her chin, gently turning her head as he scans her. Again his eyes find Daryl's, and again she sees _something_ pass between them that she doesn't know how to define. "Scead. But not the one you've been in. This…" He gestures around them. "It's _under_."

"Less _formed,_ I guess you'd say," Glenn says from behind him. "It's not stable. Getting into it's a lot harder. It's… Well, yeah. You kinda know that. And we're not in a great neighborhood."

"Do I even wanna know what that means?" Her palms settle against ground covered with what feels like tiny bits of gravel and she pushes, hoists herself up to sit, Daryl's hands falling away from her shoulders. She's vaguely grateful to him for not trying to keep her down, not insisting that she needs longer - though her head throbs once and hugely, like her heart materialized inside her skull for a few awful seconds, and she considers the possibility that lying back down might be a good idea.

But no. She's up. She's looking around, or trying, fingers at her brow - feeling, in a way she hasn't in a while, the smooth little ridge of the scar there.

"Might mean any number of things." Michonne is standing a few yards away, sword in her hands, and she doesn't look at Beth when she speaks. She's looking out at the swirling fog, scanning it as if she can comb it aside with her gaze alone. "That's part of the problem." She flicks that dark, piercing gaze to Rick, though he can't see her. He's still crouched beside Beth, his own gaze keenly evaluating. "We need to move."

Rick rises, turns. Apparently whatever he saw in Beth - features or eyes or something else - satisfied him. Which she'll assume is good, until she has a reason to not do so. "We know what direction yet?"

"I've got a sense." Glenn walks slowly past him, every step deliberate, his head up. Nose lifted and nostrils flaring, scenting as much as he is looking. "Not a great one, but yeah. It's a start." He lifts a hand and points, and Beth follows the gaze of the others and surveys what she's dealing with.

Around them, as her initial glimpses indicated, is all swirling fog - or something for which _fog_ is the closest possible word. Shapes lurk within it, and they don't seem to be stationary. They're fading out and fading in, sometimes bigger and sometimes smaller, and there's something about them that slithers nausea into her gut if she looks at one of them for more than a few seconds at a time. Like seasickness, maybe.

The place at which Glenn is pointing is twenty or so yards away, and is probably best described as a tunnel. Except it's like no tunnel Beth has ever seen, no tunnel she ever _wanted_ to see: its mouth is a three-meter gaping maw of what looks like glistening, knotted muscle run through with purplish veins, and the curved ceiling and walls beyond are the same. It's a cave of skinned flesh, and it runs - gently pulsing - into the shadows and is gone. Above it, the fog closes again.

Somehow it's the pulsing that's the worst. Like a heartbeat, but also like respiration. And also like the impossibly slow wriggling progress of an enormous worm.

Carol sighs. "Really?" But she sounds already resigned to it, and Michonne starts forward, Glenn beside her. He glances back, giving her - and all of them - an apologetic little smile.

"You know what's out there is probably worse."

Shane goes after them, muttering, and Rick turns to Beth, looking as if he might be about to offer her a hand up, but she's rising, Daryl's fingertips a ghost's touch on her shoulder. She's unsteady, still hurting everywhere, but on her feet without wavering too badly, and the ground remains solid beneath her, the knife's handle a cool, comforting knob beneath her curved palm. Her head lodges another vehement complaint and returns to merely hurting. The light…

She's fine with the light now. It's everything else she's not at all sure about.

She jerks her head at the tunnel as Daryl moves to her side, silent as the fog itself. "The hell's _that?_ "

"In this place, nothing is anything. That's why we almost never come here." Rick nods at the others, shoots Daryl the smallest of glances, and starts walking, clearly expecting the two of them to follow.

And of course she will. Because it's not as if she's spoiled for choice when it comes to options.

Ever.

"The Benescead is what was left over after the creation of the universe." Rick's voice is hushed, as if it's possible that someone or something might overhear him and that's an outcome he'd like to avoid. "That's how the story goes, anyway."

Just ahead of them Glenn and Michonne have almost reached the mouth of the thing, and Beth stares at it because she can't look at anything else, stares at it as it swells in her vision, beating itself into existence with a rhythm that feels like the antithesis of everything Cora was. She can smell it, too; the air here was initially motionless and absent any discernible scent at all, but now - on a soft, warm breeze that feels far too much like breath - she can smell the sharp, hard, sickly-sweet odor of fresh blood, and what she recognizes from years of being present for various kinds of farm slaughter as the smell of _meat._

It wasn't an unpleasant smell, before. It actually would have made her think of home.

Rick's voice is something to hold onto, and she clings at it, searching once again for Daryl's hand. She doesn't even think about it now. Doesn't wonder if she should, doesn't wonder if she should be embarrassed, if she's being too visibly weak. He's there. She'll reach for him and she'll find him and she does, his thickly calloused and incredibly gentle fingers closing around hers.

And right now she doesn't care what Rick sees. If it even matters.

"Okay, but what _is_ it?"

"Raw material," Daryl murmurs. "Didn't get used for nothin'. So it tries to make itself into somethin', over and over."

Rick nods. His mouth is tight, hand on his gun, and his gaze doesn't settle. It's everywhere at once. "And it never lasts. Like Glenn said, it's not stable. It's always changing. Sometimes it's just like a landscape. Sometimes," he gestures with his chin at the arch of raw muscle rising over them, "it's somethin' in between. And sometimes-"

"Sometimes it's alive," Daryl finishes, still in a murmur. Beth glances at him; his free hand is on the crossbow's strap. All of them. All of them ready to fight in seconds. "And it's hungry."

"But." Christ, she can't look up. Can't look anywhere. The smell - the _stench -_ is falling over her like a fine mist, and in a few more steps her boots will leave the slatey ground and touch _it._ Her stomach is huddled, shivering, against the bottom of her diaphragm, and it's making it difficult to speak. And breathe. "I don't… Is it all one thing? Is it a bunch of things?"

In front of her Shane half turns, a thinly amused smile pulling at his mouth. "Both. And neither."

Still that thing where she can't get any answers. Or where the answers she does get only lead her to more questions. So she shuts up and stares ahead because it's the best option, because it allows her to unfocus her eyes until everything around her blurs into an indistinctness which is, if not comforting, probably as close as she's going to get.

The flesh tube swallows her.

It doesn't, not really. The ceiling doesn't descend. The floor doesn't rise to meet it. She doesn't look back, but she doesn't think the mouth of the thing is closing behind them. The light doesn't change - although it becomes apparent, a few yards in, that there's a source of light other than the charitably termed _daylight_ outside. It's impossible to say where it's coming from. It might be coming from everywhere. Coming through the walls.

It's reddish in hue. It does no one any favors. As they all draw closer together and she finally glances around, none of their faces look friendly. None of them even look completely familiar.

She doesn't look at Daryl. She doesn't want to see that.

It's silent except for the soft squelch of their footfalls. She might have expected dripping somewhere, nearby or in the distance, but no. That slow pulsing is soundless. If the air around her - still warm, though she's somewhat used to the stench by now - is the result of some kind of respiration, she can't hear it.

It's not comforting either. It's wrong, somehow. There should be more noise. If this thing is _alive_ in any capacity, there should be noise.

"Glenn." Rick's voice echoes weirdly - not one bit like an echo off rock. It's muddy and distorted like a bad recording. "Any idea how much further this goes?"

Glenn slows, turns until he's walking half backward. He looks tense around the eyes and mouth, but the tension doesn't seem to have much of an element of worry in it. Maybe he's genuinely not worried. Maybe he's just too focused to have room for it. "Nothing I'm comfortable putting my name on. It goes _somewhere._ That's about all I can say for sure."

"Somewhere's better than nowhere," Carol says dryly. "Unless it isn't."

"But nowhere's anywhere," Beth whispers, the words crossing her tinge before she's aware of them, and she shivers. Whatever's worth this, whatever they're here for, whatever they're trying to find, trying to _know…_

If she's really a witch, it would be great if she could do some magic right about now. She's not even all that picky about what kind. Anything. Anything to feel like she has _some_ control in this trip that keeps dragging her along without a pause, without a rest or any time to get her shit together.

It would be great to have some power.

* * *

It goes on like that. Later she couldn't possibly say how long. The minutes and hours disappear into the sound of their footfalls, and those sounds bleed together into one sticky slurping noise, like two slime-covered hands slowly working over each other, over and over until she wants to scream.

She doesn't. She doesn't speak, either; there are questions, so goddamn many, but they're as slippery as the walls appear, and every time she tries to grasp one it slides away from her.

It's the quantity itself that's the issue. She has no idea where to start anymore.

 _Am I okay_ might be one. But that's one she does have the answer to, and it's _Not anymore and not ever again._ A lot of things have changed in what feels like no time at all, but some things don't feel like they're likely to change no matter _what_ else happens. And a broken girl doesn't just get fixed. Her scars don't just get magicked away.

She really doesn't think.

She walks in silence and she holds Daryl's hand, and that's enough to keep her upright and moving. She could do it on her own too, she knows that, but she doesn't _have_ to and that's the point. And she's sure she's making him happy, is the other thing. He's not talking either, isn't looking at her as far as she can determine, and the only place he's touching her is where his fingers are threaded through hers, but he's withher, and he should be able to tell that he's giving her something she wants, so he must be happy. She can _tell_ he's happy. It's no one thing, nothing she could point to as a clearly perceptible signifier, but it's there all the same, seeping into her like his warmth. He feels it and so can she, and he's happy.

And that's good.

She squeezes. He squeezes back. They're behind everyone now and no one is glancing back at them, and even close to Carol and Shane like they are, she feels as if it's the closest they've gotten to time alone since…

Fuck, this morning? It was. It was this morning. Or something like that. She's not sure she can place any expectation of reliability on _time_ now.

Regardless, she isn't saying anything to him. But she also doesn't feel like she has to. The questions are impossible. A lot of the other things they could be talking about seem like they should be left alone in mixed company. What's left is this, this silence, and under the ambient fear and the disgust she still feels when she allows herself to become truly aware of where they are, and the fact that she has no idea where any of this is going and has a strong suspicion that it isn't going anywhere good…

Is a space she doesn't feel the need to fill. Because it's full already.

One foot in front of the other. One in front of the other, until she reaches the end.

* * *

The end comes very abruptly.

If it had come slowly, gradually - she thinks later - it probably would have been more surprising, because the thing about this place is that nothing eases into difference. This is her first real experience of that. In the Benescead, every transition is an explosion. As if the bones of a changing Hathsta didn't crack softly as they rearranged themselves but _shattered,_ bursting out through their skin in a bloody hail of fragments.

This is like that.

She had been vaguely afraid, as they walked, that the flesh-tunnel might collapse on them. Instead it suddenly splits wide open, first above them and on all sides, and what it reveals is abyssal blackness whipped with swinging bands of fire. Ropes of it extending between larger spheres, their faces seething with fusion as they spin through the dark.

 _Suns,_ Beth thinks dully as she stands gaping, Daryl's hand slipped away and lost. They're little suns. Not much bigger than an average house, but their heat doesn't feel modest for all their reduction in size. They blast her face and her skin, wheeling around and below and over them, and the few feet of throbbing meat between them and it is peeling away, oozing clear fluid from unseen pores as it does.

As one they stumble backward, fumbling at nothing. "Glenn?" Rick doesn't sound panicked, but there's a tightness in his voice that Beth can tell is holding back something not unlike it. Once that would have added to her anxiety but now it just seems reasonable. Would almost be more unsettling if he wasn't freaking out right now.

A fire whip so close to her face, a rush of air and overpowering heat. Or maybe not _that_ close, but it seems that way, and she imagines the smell of burning hair. Burning flesh.

Doesn't have to imagine. That smell is scorched into her nasal passages. It's seared into her brain.

"Can't go back." As soon as Glenn says it, the tunnel behind them collapses away into more of that endless void of blackness and fire. Pressing herself back against Daryl's body, clutching for her knife instead of his hand, Beth can see nothing beyond it; it is all that is.

And nothing here is anything.

"We gotta do _somethin',_ " Shane barks, and Glenn whirls to them, his eyes wide and dark and wild.

"Jump."

"You're insane," Carol says - _says._ As if it's not an argument at all. Merely an observation.

"Trust me. Jump. Now."

"We got any other options?" Rick shoves himself forward, glancing back at the rest of them. His face is bizarrely, terrifyingly calm. "You heard him. Everyone together. _Move._ "

She's a blank. She doesn't think. Doesn't process. Maybe because she doesn't have to; it's very simple. The ground - such as it was - is falling apart. There isn't much left to do but fall.

Falling is very easy. You just let go.

And anyway, Daryl is herding her forward. More than herding. His arms are abruptly around her in an embrace so tight it's difficult to fill her lungs, and instinctively she gropes for his forearms, clamps her hands down on the thick muscle there. It should maybe make her feel secure, suppress the terror quaking up along her spine, and it _does,_ but it also doesn't. She can't get free. He has her, and he's too strong. He's taking her with him, and she has no choice.

Yet again.

She watches the others go over, half jumping and half dropping, clumsy and with no attempt to make themselves any form of aerodynamic. Which she has no idea if it even has a _point_ , and then as she watches Carol's silvery head fade into the fire-veined black, she's going, they're both going, and he's not content to fall. Seconds before the flesh beneath them dissolves into the void he flings himself away from it, _leaps_ , and he's human but all at once she's back there in the alley, standing with her knife in her hand, staring up and watching him hurl himself through the air and down to meet her.

The grace in that enormous body. The power and the control. Which he has again, even if they're falling.

 _Beautiful._

A tentacle of roiling flame arcs up toward them, and it's close enough for her to _feel_ its roar in the center of her chest. It's white-hot and blue at its core, and she can't look at it, she squeezes her eyes shut and grips Daryl's arms so tight that she doesn't think she's imagining the sensation of her nails cutting into his skin.

His breath warm on the back of her neck; she's oddly aware of it as she slides into the numb gut-terror of free fall. Lethal heat writhing all around her but he's there and he's warm, holding her close, wrapping himself around her like he did when she discovered the barn was gone, even if now he's just a man. Wrapping himself around her like he did in her bed. She's clasped. Enclosed.

Her eyes were squeezed shut, but a wave of heat rolls past and yanks at her hair, and they pop open and she sees where they're going. Not any of the others. No trace. Which makes sense, because what they're hurtling toward is one of those suns, face blazing and rippling and surging with looping storms.

She might be screaming but it doesn't matter. There's nothing she can do. There's gravity in this space and it has her sure as he does. Has them. Won't let them go. There's no missing it. It's too huge. It's rising to meet them, one of those arching storms extending toward them, and she watches this with sudden bizarre calm and thinks _it's going to end like this after all._

Her hair on fire. Skin blistering, crisping, blackening. The cooking smell of her own flesh. Her eyes bursting, melting, flowing down her cheeks like the ultimate release of every tear she ever might have shed.

He's going to hold her in his arms as they both burn.

She lets herself go still. Relaxed. It doesn't matter, no. Nothing does. Which is good, maybe, because she's so tired of everything. The whole fucking thing. She doesn't want answers, or vengeance, or to understand. She just wants to rest. Join them, if there _is_ anything after this.

And if there isn't, that's fine too.

Releasing a breath, she closes her eyes again, and the inferno devours them.

* * *

 _Except_ _no, it's not an inferno. Not at all. It's a sun, sure - it's_ many _suns, a cluster of them like a palm full of golden beads caught by daylight. But they're not burning her up. She's too big for them to do that. She's close, leaning over - crouching, that's what she's doing, and now she lowers herself the rest of the way onto her knees and gazes down._

 _So beautiful, this bouquet of stars. So brilliant, but she can look at it. It doesn't make her eyes ache. It's kind. She looks at it and she feels warm all over, like kneeling in a patch of summer grass, like bending down to press her cheek into its cool gentle blades._

 _Her scar._

Do you have it now? Do you have them?

 _Reaching up to touch her left cheek. All smooth, skin markless but for the few tiny pits left behind from a brief but nightmarish bout with acne when she was fourteen. Touches her brow; no little ridge of tissue. She hasn't been hurt. She hasn't been broken. She hasn't lost everything. She hasn't lost her mind._

 _She hasn't lost her song._

 _Because she's gazing into this heart of suns, heart of stars, and her vision is widening. The world around her is expanding, swelling like a taken breath. Not very much, but enough to allow her to see - because a heart needs a body to hold it. It needs something within which to beat. It can't be alone, can't survive that way, and she sees the red cradle in which this stellar heart has settled itself - a fathomless red, the deepest and richest red she's ever seen or will ever see, red that falls over her mind like fold upon fold of heavy velvet. It might smother her but she gasps, in wonder and terror and awe, as the song bursts through the red, interweaves with it like two sets of threaded fingers. It's soft, almost inaudible, but it rises and fills the air and it fills her_ head _and from there it runs like a river in flood through her veins, through her bones, and all of her wants to break open with it. She wants to shatter into a million pieces of song, because_ this, _once she had_ this _and the fire took it from her and the blood took it from her, and it killed her then. It ripped it out of her, ripped out her heart, and it killed her, and since then she's been walking dead._

Except you know that's not true. Not anymore.

 _On her knees and hugging herself, trembling from her marrow to the tip of her tongue, weeping, nose running, spit trickling from the corner of her mouth, all soaked between her legs, because she can't contain it, it's all gushing out of her, but though her cells are vibrating with every note on every scale her throat is locked and she can't._

 _She's missing. Missing something._

Every lock has a key.

 _But now she can see it, oh my God, she can_ _see it, like she did, like before, unfurling and blooming right before her streaming eyes, so red red red and so beautiful she can't stand it but she can_ see it now _and she knows_

* * *

"Beth."

His arms are just as strong around her. He's holding her just as tight, which is a considerable accomplishment given that they should only exist now as whatever particles are left after a star completely incinerates a human body. She's surprised by it, then impressed, and then she feels the cool breeze across her face, lifting away strands of hair like gentle fingers. Smells, and it's not the smell of her own cooking meat. It's not the smell of her own personal summer barbecue.

It's a deep smell. A _living_ smell.

 _Cheek in the grass, the bending of the blades as they welcome her._

"Daryl." It's not exactly a question. It's more a statement of fact. Her eyes are closed, she realizes, and she opens them and sees what she sees.

What she sees is a wide expanse of grassy ground on which Rick and Shane and Glenn are crouched, heads close together as they confer in low, tense voices about something she can't make out. Carol and Michonne nearer to her, the latter scanning the treeline - because there _is_ a treeline to her right, tall thin trees that look for all the world like more pines.

Except they aren't.

Dreamily - because Christ, she can't remember when this all _didn't_ feel like a dream - she tugs herself away from Daryl and he releases her without resistance, silent. She takes a step across that grass, another, and again the breeze caresses her. It strokes through her hair as if it's happy to see her.

The trees aren't trees. They're stone. All stone. Trunks and branches and needles, all polished green stone.

The breeze isn't coming from them. It's coming from her left. She turns that way and looks, and can't stop. She's caught and held by sheer bewilderment - and really she shouldn't even _be_ particularly bewildered, because how the fuck is _this_ any weirder than anything else she's run into so far?

But it is. Somehow.

In front of her, no more than forty yards away, the grass thins and transitions into a sandy shoreline that extends in both directions as far as she can see. Beyond it is an ocean. This in itself isn't strange in the least. She's seen the ocean. She's been to the fucking beach. She knows what it looks like. This is a perfectly normal looking beach. Except for the stone trees, this isn't weird at all.

Except between her and the ocean, free-standing and - as far as she can tell - completely unsupported on the sand, unattached to anything at all, is a tall wooden door.


	26. if I let you back in close

**Chapter 26: if I let you back in close**

She stares at it for a moment. The beach, the door, the two of them together in their juxtaposed context. The moment expands, swells and acquires density, and she feels it settling around her shoulders like a blanket. Like a yoke. She'll have to carry this, she's dimly realizing as she beholds this thing - yet another one - that doesn't seem like it should be. She'll have to add this to the pile of shit that makes no sense but is nevertheless now a feature of her experience of life, and haul it around with the rest.

 _You're moving forward,_ Maggie whispers behind her ears. _And it's making you strong. You know that._

She grits her teeth. She was already strong. Had to be, to make it this far. How much more does she _need?_

Fuck of a lot. Probably. Because that's the deeper whisper, all that pity and those petty little voices and behind-the-back stares in the hallways, the sidelong narrow-eyed looks of the teachers, the doctors studying her much too closely and chewing on lips with sour breath and pens and scratching condescending notes, the nurses with needles and restraints and the clamp grips, and the _relatives_ who - every day - made her feel as if she was being carved away from the world.

And her standing in the bathroom with a shard of bloody glass in her hand, staring at her own shattered face in the remains of the mirror.

 _You're not strong enough._

Over and over she clenched her fists in the dark. After the mirror and the glass, in the hospital. She clenched her fists and felt her unbandaged wrist flex and swelled with a frozen rage she never felt before, and which has never truly left her.

 _I am strong._

"Beth."

She jerks at his touch, whirls - and instantly feels bad when he takes half a step back, brow furrowed and mouth tight with apprehension. Daryl isn't one of them.

No one here is.

But God, the past chases her like a pack of ravenous wolves, and apparently it can catch her literally worlds away.

"Y'alright?"

She nods. She thinks it might actually look pretty convincing. Anyway, it's true. She's all right. She's not sure what the fuck else she is, but she's on her feet and breathing and thinking and she's still armed, so she's all right. That's how this particular proof has worked and is working and will probably continue for the rest of whatever life she has. "Where the hell are we?"

"Not sure. They're talkin' about it now." He's left his bow behind - tells her something in and of itself - and inclines his head back toward where Rick and Shane and Michonne are now conducting a second huddled conference. Glenn is crouched a short way to the side with his eyes closed, appearing to be lost in some kind of meditation. As Beth watches, he lowers a hand and lays it - palm flat - against the ground.

Glenn is very weird. Not that everything else isn't.

"What're we doin' next?"

"Guess we'll know when we figure out where we are."

Beth tilts her face up and gazes at the sky. It's a cloudless dusky pink, a faded rose color like antique wallpaper, and it looks like it might be dawn or late sunset or really anytime. There's no sun, but out across the flat gray water there's a hint of one hiding just beneath the horizon, that might rise or might fall when it makes up its stellar mind.

All those suns. She saw. Didn't she? Weren't they there, all clustered like the golden pollinated heart of some unfathomable flower?

Didn't she see that?

 _In the red?_

"Are we anywhere?" she whispers, and he touches her shoulder again. Both of them. Lays his hands on them, his big, warm palms cupping their slopes, and she leans into the touch. A little. Just a little.

She still feels like maybe they should be careful. Even if she can't say exactly why.

"That thing says we are."

"Mm?" Her attention was keeping itself locked on the sky, bits of it beginning to drift into the steady, gentle crash of the waves, but he says _that thing,_ and while it takes her a second or two to figure it out, by the time her eyes are lowered and she's looking straight ahead, she knows.

There's really only one _thing_ he could mean. There it is, bizarrely unassuming, like it has every reason for standing there hinged on thin air, leading to nothing whatsoever that she can see. Like it belongs precisely in this place at this time. And she's not sure she'd even argue with it.

"What is it?"

He squeezes her, and when he speaks his voice is a low, amused rumble that she can almost feel in her shoulderblades. "'s a door, girl."

"Fuck you," she says amiably, and steps away from him. He lets her go, but as she moves carefully forward across the grass toward the sand - placing her feet one at a deliberate time like she doesn't entirely trust the ground, because she sure as shit doesn't - she knows he's following her. Of course.

If he wasn't, she might have to figure out a way to ask him to.

The ground seems trustworthy, anyway, and the rustle of the grass gives way to the yielding slide of the sand as her boots press into it. It's not the loose sand of a vacation beach; it's a pale gray and packed as if from repeated high tides, and a few feet ahead is a long line of debris - sticks and strands of grass and what looks like kelp that marks the high tide point itself.

And there's the door. Nearer and nearer - less than ten yards away now - and she's assuming that if it was actually dangerous in any immediate sense Daryl would have stopped her long before now, so she keeps going.

It's a rich red-brown - Beth has never been able to keep track of the different kinds of furnishing wood but for some reason she's stuck on _mahogany_ \- and aside from two panels bisecting it in the center, it's unmarked. Except there is a knob - brass gleaming in the strange half-day light.

And beneath it, there's a keyhole.

She reaches it and stops a foot or so away, gazing up at it. It's a good couple of heads taller than her, though not as tall as it appeared from a distance, but there's nothing about it that's currently intimidating her. From back up on the grass it had seemed unassuming, and it still feels that way. It's not here for any ominous purpose. It doesn't feel to her as if it's her for any special purpose at all.

It just is.

She does what she figures anyone would do in this situation and walks around it, examines it from the other side. Stands exactly at the midpoint between the two and tilts her head back and forth.

They're identical, those two sides. Nothing in front. Nothing behind.

"We don't have names for 'em," Daryl says quietly. "They're just doors. But when they show up… They don't do that just anywhere."

He's behind her, very close, but she doesn't jump. She wonders if he could ever startle her again, simply by being there. Maybe she's beginning to expect him to be.

She doesn't turn. "This isn't the only one?"

He hums a soft negative. "We find 'em here and there. Dunno where they come from. Who made 'em. They've just always been… around. I guess."

The knob keeps grabbing her focus, holding on. Gripping. Cool little fingers gliding across her mind like the gleam of the brass. She wants to… Touch it? Close her hand around it, cup her palm over its breeze-cooled metal. Feel its solidity, its density. How it fits her, the joints of her fingers and thumb. What then? Turn it?

She knows without having to try that it would be locked. And she doesn't have a key.

"You ever open 'em?"

"Never seen 'em open."

"That's not what I asked you." Slowly she turns to face him, arms crossed. If he's genuinely being evasive there's no obvious reason why, but it's not as if any obvious reasons are needed for anything at the moment. But he's meeting her eyes without flinching, without dropping his own, and one of the few things she's sure of now is that he can't lie to her.

He said he couldn't lie to Rick, early on. His eal… And now his agend.

"I've heard of 'em bein' opened," he says, voice low. Faintly thoughtful. He shakes his hair out of his eyes and shrugs. "But nothin' I'd trust. Nothin' I'd be sure about." He hesitates, then, "Don't ask me what's on the other side. I dunno. No way to say."

"Do any of you know anythin'? Ever? At all?" Once - earlier today, in fact - she would have been angry all over again. But at this point it's just funny. She thought she was clueless, when this all began. Thought she was lost. But here they are, creatures who have always lived on a side of the world where she's still a newcomer, and even with their _pathfinder_ she seriously doubts any of them know much more than she does. At least when it comes to things that matter.

So she's smiling. It's small and very dry, but she is, and after a few seconds he returns it. Just as small. Just as dry.

For the first time since she climbed off his bike in that fucking parking lot, she feels mostly okay.

"These days? Not so much."

He extends a hand. She regards it in silence for a few seconds more, then takes it. It's very warm in the cool, constant breeze washing in with the waves, the breeze that catches strands of his hair and tosses them lightly around. Bits of his face coming into view in light that makes him look even stranger than normal, his narrow eyes and the hints of his incisors and the sharp ridges of his cheekbones - even fully a man he looks like he's perennially on the cusp of changing. Like he hasn't quite mastered the skill of passing for human.

The Wolf just beneath his skin.

Or possibly he has a slightly harder time holding the form when he's with her. If it usually takes any effort at all.

It's insane given what's just happened and what's happening and where they are, what they might be up against, but it hits her all at once: She could kiss him now. If she wanted. Jettison that sense that they should be careful and haul him close, push up on her toes and kiss him, rake her hands into his hair and arch her mouth open wide and wet against his, dance over those lupine teeth with the point of her tongue. Press close and lick at him the way she did. Feel that monster rippling beneath his surface, clawing to get free.

She could kiss him now and fuck them if they see. Fuck them if they have some kind of problem with it.

 _He's hers._

He wants to be.

He glances over his shoulder. She follows his focus; the conference appears to have broken up, and Rick and Michonne are pacing in in opposite directions around what looks like might be a rough circle, bending now and then to do something she can't see. Carol is crouched in the center of it - assuming there is a center - and a flickering golden light like a candle is springing into being beneath her hands.

"Should get back," Daryl murmurs. "Looks like they're makin' camp."

"Not yet." She does tug - she tugs hard, suddenly needy, _hungry_ for him with all the shivering emptiness left behind by fading fight-or-flight - and he stumbles in close, head whipping back around and reaching for her. But before he lays his rough hands against her face and tilts her head up to meet him, she catches something sharply alarmed flashing behind his animal eyes.

Then the cool salt air dissolves into his heat and hers and a rushing exchange of it, his teeth digging into her lips and his fingers tangling in her loosened hair, the ghosts of claws scratching the sides of her throat, his tongue curling against hers and welcoming her into him as his chest vibrates with a deep growl. She's gripping his arms, muscles flexing under her touch - that shivering ripple. His bones grinding against each other as they collide and try to pull apart.

His whole body wants to be something else.

But he's holding it in. Holding himself together with all the strength he can muster. She nearly grins; she gets it. He has to. If he didn't, they might do something very inappropriate right here on the sand.

Daryl. She mouths it against his jaw, bites at him, and he shivers and gropes at her, jerks her hips against him - his cock a hard, straining bulge in his jeans and so ready for her hands, _both hands around his impossibly thick shaft with precome dripping over her knuckles, and the silk of his fur over her skin and tickling her pussy, his huge thumb on her clit, stroking and grinding and her tongue lapping at his muzzle and his enormous body pinning her down and FUCK_ there are people close enough to see them both and it turns out she does care about that, because she's yanking herself away, panting, blinking up at him like someone shaken out of a dream.

This is getting out of hand.

He looks like she feels: Flushed. Shaken. Shaking. Maybe a bit stunned. Pressing his fingers to his lower lip and bringing them away smeared with red.

Her blood or his?

Has it ever really mattered?

"We can't-" he breathes, and she cuts him off.

"I know."

He nods. Drops his hand to his side. He's still sporting an extremely obvious erection, and even if she's not sure exactly how their undoubtedly keen senses work, she's almost certain that if she goes back to them now they'll smell her like a bitch in heat, and while no questions will be necessary, it'll be really fucking awkward.

"This is crazy." She delivers the observation with the distant cousin of a smile - just as dry as before, but also as shaky as she feels, and his ragged laugh matches. He looks away, out at the endless slate ocean, and his hair sweeps across his face with his gaze and she can't see his eyes anymore.

Something unseen is coming in with the tide.

"Look around, girl. Sanity's a luxury we ain't got."

"The world's ending."

She says it abruptly, but it doesn't feel abrupt. She doesn't know how she knows, but she does. She knows it deep, knows it like the echo of a dark song working its way through her marrow, and the knowledge has always been there. It was there when he took them through the Night Gate, it was there when she let him into the rooms of ruin in which her life died, it was there when he showed her the hole in the universe, it was there when she fell through scalding light info whatever this place is, and it's been there ever since she fell to her knees in the burning grass and cradled her father's head in her gore-streaked hands.

It's been there since she saved a monster who turned into a man.

She knows it like she knows him. More and more of it all the time. Clearer and clearer. Even if so much still isn't. If there's magic lurking anywhere inside her, anything remaining of a pedigree she also somehow knew she had, it might be part of that.

She's always belonged here, after all.

For a long moment - longer than the word _moment_ really fits - he merely looks at her in silence. The rippling she started when she kissed him hasn't stopped; if anything it's intensified, and as the breeze whips itself into a wind and throws rapidly shifting bands of light and shadow across his face, the last vestiges of anything remotely human in him are blown away into the swirls of loose sand hissing around their feet.

He's worrying at something on his left hand. She lowers her eyes to it and sees, and it stabs her between the ribs, cold and thin.

The shape of a cross is burned a furious red into his palm.

Her cuff.

Like he didn't even notice when it happened. And she's not even sure when that was.

"Ain't endin'," he says, almost too soft to hear above the crashing duet of water and air. "'s just movin' on."

Nothing. She doesn't… There's nothing to say to that. There's no point in even searching for a response. None would fit. None is necessary. She hears and she takes it in, folds it into the knowledge already nestled inside her. It fits there. There's no conflict. He's right. So is she.

When something leaves you behind, it might as well end.

"I wanna walk for a while."

The way he says it - quiet but more direct, not so much a declaration of something as a thing laid down in front of her, presented to her - she knows he's asking permission to leave her. And it doesn't freak her out. It doesn't wrench at her gut, doesn't send fear lancing down her throat.

He is what he is. So is she. To and for each other, and nothing can change that now.

Even if she _wanted_ to change it anymore.

She dips her chin. "Go ahead."

He nods and takes a step back, and when his bones start to crack, start to stretch his skin as his body rearranges itself, she feels only the briefest flare of lust. All the heat that surged up between them has died back - still there, but banked. Smoldering.

She glances at the others - now gathered around the light Carol was making, and if they'd been watching they aren't any longer. She looks back at him and she's in time to see his massive shoulders hunching, shrinking, long head pulling into a smaller version of itself and his legs evening out as his back levels.

Big black wolf standing there on the stand, gazing up at her with fur shining and eyes caught and mirrored by the hidden sun's light.

She wants to run with him. Pull off her boots and toss them into the grass and run barefoot across the sand until all of this is gone, so far behind them it might have ended. She doesn't care if she's a witch. She doesn't care if she's important somehow, or this all Means Something everyone continues to refuse to fully explain. She doesn't give a fuck.

She just wants to run.

"Go," she whispers, and he trots away.

He doesn't run.

She turns and looks at the door for a long time. At the gleaming handle. At the hole where a key might go, if someone had one.

Then, wearily, she hauls herself back up onto the grass and toward the family that isn't now and never will be hers.


	27. transfer my tragedy

**Chapter 27: transfer my tragedy**

The light Carol made isn't a fire. It's _like_ a fire in that it gives off illumination and a meager amount of heat, but it doesn't flicker or dance and it's not burning anything Beth can see - which it basically couldn't anyway, given that there doesn't appear to be anything to burn. The grass is all fresh and and alive and the forest - such as it is - is stone.

And Beth doesn't want to look at the forest for any longer than she has to. The spreading branches, the thick trucks, needles, and all that polished opaque green shining utterly motionless in the half-light - It's all _wrong_ somehow, in a way the ocean and the beach and even the door were not.

The ocean and the beach were formed - or so she imagines. The door was made - of that much she's sure. The trees?

She has no idea why they're here.

Shane and Glenn and Carol are crouched around it, all three of them unspeaking - at least as far as she can discern. Rick and Michonne are still walking the wide circle that Beth guesses is serving as some kind of protective perimeter. Their heads are down, gazes intent, and only Rick spares her the quickest glance as she walks by. The light continues to toy with its strange collection of shadows, scattering them like playing cards, and whatever expression might otherwise have been readable on Rick's face remains entirely mysterious to her.

But there are his eyes, and as always, when they settle on her, their focus has weight. It has density.

It pulls at her.

Then his attention directs itself downward, his head lowered, and he seems content to ignore her.

So.

The light stands in the center of a bare patch in the grass, and as she sinks down onto her knees she sees that it's a pillar more than anything else - a slender cylinder of pale glowing gold. It's not the same color as the sky, either its general hue or the myriad other colors lurking inside it, but somehow it harmonizes, and as she gazes at it, an older and stubbornly present part of her calms and settles. That part of her remembers how, when she was small and upset for one reason or another, Maggie and Mama would sing in harmony to soothe her. It was the harmony itself, she understood years later - years too late. It wasn't the singing so much as the grace of its parts and how they came together. It was _right_ in a way that made the rest of the world feel right as well. Put right whatever had gone wrong in her simple little girl life.

Now this shade of pale gold makes her feel the same, and she doesn't wonder at it.

They're looking at her. All three of them. Not with any dislike or distrust, not with anything more than plain curiosity as far as she can tell. Even Shane isn't scowling at her, and that's indicative of something - though she doesn't know quite what. They look at her, and something about the way their scrutiny moves over her fills her with the image of all of them crawling toward her, leaning in, scenting her the way Daryl did that first morning.

She shifts onto her ass and crosses her legs, hands folded loosely in the cradle of her lap, and closes her eyes. They can look. That's fine. She's so far beyond caring. If anyone starts sniffing around her face that might be a problem, but they can look all they want.

But when she opens her eyes a few minutes later, they've all gone back to whatever it was they were doing.

Which doesn't appear to be much at all. Shane has drawn his knife and is turning it over and over in his hands, fingers sliding repeatedly and meditatively across the blade. Carol has produced a small leather pouch and is carefully shaking its contents into her palm - a fine reddish powder, the smell of which is strong enough to hit Beth in the nose from feet away. It's not exactly unpleasant: a pungently bizarre hybrid of cinnamon and rosemary and a host of other unidentifiable things. Carol tosses a pinch of it at the light, which flares suddenly brighter and hotter, flushing into a bright red before it fades back toward its original gold.

It doesn't seem to have done much of anything.

Carol looks up as if sensing the unasked question - possibly she has. "Warding," she says simply. "Rick and Michonne are drawing a circle, but." She shrugs. "Where we are, it's not overkill."

"Where we might be." Glenn shakes his head once, slow. "I'm telling you, we're safer here than we would be just about anywhere else."

Shane snorts, jabs at the door with the point of his knife. "Safe? With that thing there? You kiddin'?"

Glenn heaves a sigh, and it's heavy with exasperation. "That thing is _why_ we're safe. I explained this already. I didn't think it was that complicated."

"It's a fuckin' _door,_ " Shane snaps - and it's nearly a literal snap, his teeth flashing briefly in the not-fire's light. "I don't give a damn how _stable_ it is. If I'm sleepin' near it, I'm not sleepin' easy."

"So you can go sleep somewhere else," Carol says mildly, rocking back on her heels. "No one's stopping you."

Shane glares, growls low in his throat, and - apparently having run through his arsenal of responses - goes back to his knife.

Carol folds up the pouch and tucks it away in a fold of her coat, groans softly and arches her back in a stretch that would be almost lazy if it weren't for the obvious weariness permeating every flex of every muscle involved. "Speaking of sleep." She rocks forward and presses her hands into the grass, hunches herself into a chorus of cracking bone.

Beth watches the transformation but not with any real interest, and when the silver-gray wolf who was just a woman shakes herself and settles down half curled in the grass, what she primarily feels is a dull species of envy. Because it would probably feel good to do that now. Shake loose one shape and slip into another one like a fresh change of clothes. Be something else for a while.

She draws her knees up to her chest, leans her chin on them, stares into the light until there's no meaningful difference between it and the sky and the darkness behind her closed lids. Until she can't see anything else at all.

* * *

She doesn't think she dozes. But when something - some _one_ \- rustles the grass to her left, she starts and jerks her head up, and her chin and jaw are tingling with the numbness that comes after a long period of constant pressure. The sky looks exactly the same, no more sun in evidence and certainly no less of it, and the steady crash of the waves is keeping this place's own mysterious time.

The direction of the wind has changed, though, and as she scrubs one-handed at her eyes, a low whistle drifts through the air, arcing over her before dipping into something more akin to a moan. Long and increasingly complex, coalescing into the primitive beginnings of syllables. Something that might in time become words.

Carol is still asleep by the little pillar of light, tail lying against her nose. Shane is nowhere to be seen.

The rustling thing to her left rustles again, and when she turns and raises her eyes she's not at all surprised to see Glenn standing there looking down at her, hands in his pockets and radiating that very slight sense of awkwardness he possessed when she first met him.

He clears his throat, nods at the patch of ground beside her. "Mind if I sit?"

She shrugs. She can't see any reason why she should. Though she also can't see any particular reason for wanting his company.

Unless it's simply that so far he hasn't been any form of asshole to her, and right now if she's honest some company doesn't feel like the worst thing that could possibly happen. On her very, very long list of Worst Things.

So he sits down and crosses his legs, and for a few moments he says nothing. In that quiet space the warble picks up again and rises, swells alarmingly before it dies back. It sounds mournful now, the keening of someone who's lost something, who is _themselves_ lost, and she shivers.

"It's the trees," Glenn murmurs. "Wind in them. I think that's all it is, anyway. Can't sense anything else." He shoots her a hesitant smile. "I think that's what I'm gonna go with, anyway."

She doesn't return the smile. But she's about two thirds of the way toward wanting to. So there's that.

"Never really got to say hi." He looks away from her and from the trees, out toward the edge of the water and beyond. Perhaps not truly at anything. This seems like a place where one doesn't have to struggle to unfocus. "And I don't know when we'll get another breather, so I figured…" He rolls a slim shoulder. "Figured now might be good."

There's a thing he's not saying. Likely a set of them. She feels them, feels the space they might occupy, and does so without any particular irritation. She thinks she can probably guess, anyway. The selection of possibles is somewhat limited.

"Maybe," she says, and leaves it at that. She reaches down and plucks a few blades of grass and crushes them between her fingers, and if she's making him feel even more awkward that's yet another thing she's not sure she can care about. Shane is gone, Carol is currently both asleep and a wolf, who the fuck knows where Daryl is - and when she glances over her shoulder she sees two more wolves in the grass a few yards away, the dark one pacing and a reddish brown one sitting with his ears pricked and his nose to the wind.

So it's just her and Glenn filling in the human-ish contingent. Maybe _awkward_ is exactly how it should feel.

"Feel like I should say sorry, too," he says finally - quiet, and actually not very awkward at all. He sounds certain of what he's saying. Solid within it. "Feel like _someone_ should. I have no idea what it feels like, to get hit with…" He waves a vague hand at the world in general. "All this. And it's happening so fast. I mean, _I'm_ having kind of a hard time dealing. So." He looks at her sidelong, and while his eyes haven't lost that keenly discerning edge, there's also an openness in them. In their core. Yeah, there are things he's not saying. But he means all the ones he _is._

"Shit happens fast," she says, and he nods.

"Sometimes it seems like it's just getting faster."

"So we get a breather now?" She extends a leg into the grass, suddenly overwhelmed by the urge - not unlike the one she felt on the beach - to pull her boots off.

So what the hell. She does, and takes her own deep breath when her bare toes comb into the grass.

He nods again and points at the door. "That thing. Like I said - like Shane said, actually. You weren't here when we were talking. The door is like kind of an… an anchor, I guess. Outside this place it's still all chaos, but this is a little pocket of it that doesn't change. So we're safe here. Or as safe as we're gonna be."

Beth cocks her head and scrunches her toes, and tries to ignore the violently flooding memory of hundreds of evenings in early summer, sitting in the grass and watching the fireflies rise into the dusk. Crickets and bullfrogs. All those harmonies that always made her feel so much better. And because her entire life continues to be defined by the juxtaposition of _before_ and _after,_ it hurts now - but maybe not as much as it might.

"How long are we stayin'?"

"Few hours. There isn't really any _night_ here, but Rick figures a few of us could use some sleep. No food," he adds, and sounds faintly apologetic. "We didn't come prepared. Not for this. I don't think you _can_ prepare for this."

This strikes her as understatement to the point of hilarity, and she manages a dry laugh. Feels sort of accomplished. As conversations go, given her current circumstances, this is proceeding pretty well. And she's deciding that she likes Glenn. She already knew she didn't _dis_ like him, but it's good to have arrived at this conclusion. "Yeah, think I get that."

"You really didn't know?"

"About the _witch_ thing?" Not that she needs him to clarify. It's one of two on her mental ledger, and somehow she's not expecting him to ask about the second. She shakes her head. "I knew shit was weird. I knew I shouldn't have survived. I knew I didn't know anythin'. That was it." She sighs and abruptly rakes both hands into her hair, fingertips forcing their way under where it's still held secure by her ponytail. It's a mess, tangles and snarls and elastic, and the very thought of brushing it out makes her want to lie down in the grass and pretend she doesn't have hair at all.

Maybe she _will_ hack it off. Assuming she's ever again in a position to do so.

"Well, I'm glad you know now."

She shoots him a look - a bit sharper than she intended. "Why?"

"'cause," he says, quiet as ever. "It might be the best thing that's happened to us in a couple hundred years."

She does lie down. It feels like a sensible move. She drops onto her back and stares up at the sky, arms loose and palms up at her sides. The grass is tickling her cheeks and the sides of her neck, tiny stroking fingertips, and again she thinks of fireflies. Hundreds of them, rising into the air like stars to meet the sky. When she was that young she looked at them and thought about them in terms of _thousands,_ because no other word seemed to fit a child's conception of _so many._

"Are you gonna tell me why?"

"Would you believe me if I said it was incredibly complicated?"

She laughs. Now it's as loose as her hands, loose all through her. A _breather_. Sure. She's breathing, and that's all right. "Never."

His laugh echoes hers, softer and brief. "Short answer? A lot of things are going bad. They're not working like they should. One of them is magic, and something just about everyone knows - used to know, whatever - is that nothing's been the same there since the Drya were killed. With magic, I mean. It's all been falling apart for a while now. But if you're here, if there's even one still left…" He shrugs. "Don't see how it can make anything _worse,_ anyway."

"I can't do any magic." Not arguing. She's not interested in arguing. She has no ammunition for that particular fight. All she has are facts to point out. But he doesn't answer, and when she turns her head to look up at him he's looking right back down at her, an odd little smile playing around his mouth.

"You sure?"

"I think I'd know."

But that's bullshit. Good lord, is that some bullshit.

Glenn shrugs again. "Whatever you say."

He's swung his gaze back out toward the ocean but she keeps hers on him, on his profile caught and sharpened by the light - at once delicate and strong, a depth in his eyes that one might miss if one wasn't looking. There's an aura of sadness about him, she perceives, and she can't define it but she doesn't need to give it a name to know it's there. It's like he's missing something.

It's like he's somehow incomplete.

"Why don't you ask me about him?"

He glances at her, and while he might be affecting confusion in the widening of his eyes she's not fooled. And she doesn't imagine he thinks she is. "About who?"

She lifts a hand and flicks a small collection of torn grass at him. "You know."

Again he's silent, chewing uneasily at his lower lip. The uneasiness is sudden, and she doesn't like it. She was hoping to keep this relaxed. She _needed_ it to be relaxed. She wants to talk about it, turns out she _does,_ and he might have been someone she could talk to without it being impossible or unbearable or both, except apparently not. Apparently she doesn't get to have that.

"I don't think I should," he says finally. "I don't think it's my place. I don't think it's my business."

She pushes up on her elbows, face and gut twisting - might be anger, might be irritation, might be simple _disappointment,_ and is probably a healthy dose of all those things and more. "What the hell're you talkin' about?"

"What I said. It's not my business. _You're_ his agend. What goes on between you and him…"

 _Between you and him._ He says the words with no hint of any particular distaste, nothing markedly disapproving, nothing to suggest that he feels much about it one way or the other. But they're a cover, a surface with depth beneath, and she holds his gaze as if she could pierce it that way. Daryl said it wasn't going to be a problem, and maybe it's not going to be a _problem,_ but it's going to be something.

It _is_ something.

"He's yours," Glenn says simply, and this time when he looks away it's with a kind of finality she doesn't think she can fight through. Wouldn't want to even if she could. She had something for a few minutes, a point of connection, but it's slipped away and now she's lying in the grass beside a stranger, a strange _creature,_ and just because he's friendly to her, that doesn't make him a friend.

She doesn't have any of those.

 _He's yours._

It would be great if she genuinely believed that counted.

* * *

This time she knows she's slept. She knows it because she wakes up stiff and a bit cold, lying on her side in the grass with her head pillowed on her folded arm and her knees drawn up and in. She blinks and pulls in a shuddering breath. The light has faded but now there are three wolves by it and sleeping in something very near to a pile: Carol and a smaller black wolf she identifies as Glenn resting his head on her flank, Shane lying with his back against hers and his hind legs outstretched, chin on his paws. As she pushes herself gingerly up he stirs and opens one eye, but she freezes, breath locked in her throat, and he closes it again.

She sits, presses her fingertips to her eyes, scans around. Nothing else, no one else - except for Michonne, nothing more than a pricked-eared shadow sitting between the rest of the pack and the stone forest.

Silent now. All still. Even the crashing of the waves sounds muted. Michonne knows she's there - must, must know she's awake - but if she's watching Beth, Beth can't feel it.

She's surrounded. But she's not. If there's a _veil_ in her old world and she's slipped through it, maybe there's another one here that she's fallen beyond, stepped behind it like a curtain. Maybe she can see them and feel them, they can see and feel her, but between them is a barrier, a gulf - a hole in the world full of churning formless things, rising and sinking out of sight before she can grasp the sense in them. Her own Dwolma. Haunted by her own vanished angels.

Christ, she needs to get up and walk around for a while.

She does. She shoves herself up onto unsteady legs; she was and is far more weary than she had fully realized - which might have been good, because more than once her ignorance of her own state is all that's kept her going. If she doesn't know she wants to collapse, she won't collapse.

That could be her own kind of magic. That she's even here at all.

Nothing elegant, but it's hard to argue with results.

Barefoot, she pads silently toward the beach. When she first got up and started walking, she didn't feel any dew, but as the soles of her feet touch the packed sand she glances down and sees flecks of dry grass sticking to her toes and clinging to her ankles, her damp skin glistening as the wind scatters light across it.

Mornings, now. Mornings getting up at dawn to help with the cows, to feed the chickens, to ride Nellie out across the south pasture with the sun gilding the trees and fields like altar pieces in some fantastic cathedral. Wet mornings. Her bare feet in the grass, itching in a way that made it hard to stand still. Little Beth Greene loved to sing; she also loved to dance and did so without prompting, without even music. Like she sang: without accompaniment, without lyrics or a planned melody.

She remembers being unformed and wild. She remembers how she felt possibilities bursting from her like birds from a meadow. She's perfectly cognizant of the degree to which a healthy amount of this might be nostalgia, all its rough edges sanded down and uneven lines smoothed and straightened. But it can't all be that way. Some of what she remembers must be reliable.

Some of what she held onto must be real.

She only realizes that she's stopped walking when she's standing there and looking around - and looking at the door. It's directly in front of her, but something about it is odd, and after a few seconds of staring at its rich red-brown gloss she realizes what it is.

She's come at it from the other angle. With her back to the waves, she's standing on the side that would open out on the grass and forest. If it opened at all.

 _If you had a key._

Without fear or hesitation, she reaches out and lays a hand flat against it.

It feels like a normal door. Sanded and finished wood slightly rough beneath her fingers. It's solid when she gives it a push, doesn't wobble worth a millimeter as far as she can see. She traces its twin panels in slow, smooth up-and-downs, but she leaves the handle alone. Something about it. It's not right, the way it shines - pointed, like that shine is targeted and she's in the sights. It's something about that damn keyhole. It's not like the forest, but all at once wind gusts against it and it emits a sound.

Not a moan. Again, not like the forest. Nothing like that. The keyhole _whispers,_ and before she knows some rogue part of her has made the decision, she's bending to it. Bending low and then kneeling, giving it her ear. As if it has a message for her and her alone.

And aren't those actually voices?

She tilts her head and allows her focus to settle on the incoming waves, the pinkish foam riding their crests, the endless progress of each frothy line. They lull her, remove the definition from every other sense and leave only her hearing at full strength. Except for touch, that is; she's still pleasantly conscious of the fine grain of the wood when she glides her fingers over it, palm braced against it. It's warm, she realizes. It's slightly warm. Might just be the light, but the light is either all but gone or was never here in the first place, and the air pushing in off the water is cool to the point of being chilly.

So of course it's not that.

Her ear grazes the wood. Settles. Presses. Behind the keyhole, unseen lips form words and send them to her on a stale puff of air.

 _All is silent in the stone halls of the dead. In the rooms of ruin._

Except is it?

 _You need to tell me things. This doesn't_ work _if you don't. I know you know that. You're not an idiot, no matter what asshole thing Shane takes it into his head to say._

 _I do. You're sayin' that like I ain't doin' it already._

Her eyes - which she hadn't realized she had closed - open with a pop that's nearly audible to her. Not through the keyhole; coming to her from _around_ the door, carried on the counter-wind sweeping out through the stone trunks and branches of the forest. Real voices, living voices, both tense and unhappy. One especially. One low and tighter than the other, every consonant sharp and stabbed.

"You didn't tell me this."

"Rick-"

" _You told me it wasn't Heala."_

Silence. Long silence, but for the whisper of the wind, which is now closer to a mutter. As disapproving as part of her had expected Glenn to sound. This door - this _place_ \- might not think much of what's going on here.

She mouths the word. Feels it flow easily across her tongue on a gentle breath. Like a nuzzle, like the caress of soft fur.

 _Heala._

"Didn't think it was," Daryl murmurs, and the last word is cracked in the middle. Cracked all through. She presses her cheek against the door and drags in a breath as the contents of her chest twist in on themselves. She watched Rick clamp his jaws on Daryl's throat and was sure in those few horrible seconds that she had gotten him killed. That won't happen now - that at least is something she's not afraid of - but what else?

Because Rick sounds angry. And worse.

Rick sounds scared.

"Was one thing when it was Scyld," he hisses, and Beth can picture him close, crowding in on Daryl like he did before, maybe a hand on his shoulder. Gripping him. She hadn't mistaken the steel in that cool blue. " _This,_ though, with everything else that's happening - God, with what she could _mean_ \- and you…" He trails off, releasing a hard sigh, and Beth hears the crunch of his boots on the sand.

And Daryl whines.

It's very soft, very quiet, completely inhuman. Not pain, at least nothing physical. It's the pure distress of an anxious dog that knows something is wrong, maybe something it's done, and is bewildered by it and desperate to make it right.

More crunching and another sigh - Daryl this time. Calmer. Rick standing in front of him, hands framing his face with their heads tipped together. Maybe that's not what's happening now, but it's like that. Rick might be hard, but she's known pretty much since she saw him that he's not cruel.

That he loves these people. That they're his family. Even the newcomer. Even the one who doesn't quite fit in.

Maybe especially him.

"Does she know?"

"I told her… Some. A little." Daryl swallows. "I guess… No. She don't know what it is. Not really."

Softer: "Do you wanna mate with her?"

Silence again. Long silence. She turns on the sand, ear still near the keyhole, and stares out at the incoming waves until the sky and the water bleed into each other, erasing the horizon line. It comes to her after a few seconds that she's not breathing. She's not bothered by it. Oxygen doesn't feel entirely necessary. It's possible that it might be dangerous, might swell her up to the point of ignition. Pure oxygen, and a spark.

Her scars are burning.

"Yeah," Daryl whispers, and she's sure her skin has caught fire. Flames all through her, searing her red and black, but a sudden gush of wet between her legs, sticking her panties to her when she moves. Almost like she's pissed herself, except for the swollen throb of her lips and her clit. She bites at the insides of her cheeks to keep back a groan; _fuck,_ they'll smell her. They have to.

 _Mate with him._ Plunging into her, _taking_ her, pumping her full with his teeth at the top of her spine. Holding her down. _Fuck,_ yes. Her hands clench, fingers digging furrows into the sand, as if she could claw the world in to fit the place where he's not.

"It could hurt you." Pause. "It could hurt _her._ Could ruin you both inside. Daryl, fuckin' hell… She's _Drya_."

"Think I don't _know_ that?" Nearly another whine, but tenser. Edging toward anger. "I can't _help_ it. Been tryin'. Gyden, _swear_ I have. Been tryin' so damn hard." He hisses in a breath. "You got Lori. You ever try to stop? Ever?"

"No," Rick says quietly. Gently. "Never had to. I know." He lets out a long, thick breath. "Shit, I know."

"I dunno what to do." He's fallen back to a whisper, back to that broken core. This monster, the strongest creature she's ever seen, weak and lost and it's because of her. "It's how I learned it. But I didn't know. What it's like. When I'm around her… _Fuck,_ I want it so bad."

"You have to tell her. Daryl. Daryl, look at me." The next words a bit muffled; very close now. Difficult to hear. She covers her eyes with one trembling hand. "You have to tell her all of it. _Everything._ Give her a choice. Make it a real one."

"If she says…" Daryl chokes on the words and the last one wrenches into nothingness. Into the waves and the deeper whispers through the keyhole. Into _her,_ and whatever it is she might say.

"Yeah. I know." Another pause, a shaking breath. This time she's not sure whose it is. Doesn't think it matters. "Efensorge, broder. I'm so sorry."

Finally she can't take it, and damn the risks - damn them especially since it sounds like they're nothing to what's coming at her now. She turns over, palms flat on the sand, and peeks around the edge of the door. Around where it would open, if it did.

The two of them, standing a few feet away. Standing close, like she thought. Felt. Not quite embracing; Daryl hunched, brow resting on the ridge of Rick's shoulder, and Rick's fingers combed into his hair. Combing. Stroking him, nuzzling at the crown of his head, and she nearly looks away, the burn in her scars flushing into her cheeks and ears. How she felt in the parking lot, like before: she's seeing something that isn't for her, an intimacy to which she has no right. Like spying on people fucking - but no. Nothing like that whatsoever.

That's just the closest she can get to something unlike anything she's seen in her life.

"You're cyne," Rick murmurs. "You're _spyre._ You got a place. Whatever happens, far as I'm concerned you always got a place."

She sinks back behind the door, sand cool and yielding under her palms, and lowers herself until her forehead is pressed against it, her eyes squeezed shut - prostrating herself before a sun that will never rise or set. The heat between her legs is eating through her, surging up through her core, but it's unimportant. What matters is the man behind that door.

Frightened. Desperate. She knew. She just didn't really understand.

Still doesn't.

Boots crunching, moving away. Rustling of the grass. One set alone. Then only the waves again, the wind, those whispers that she's _certain aren't merely her imagination. Gritty sand forced under her fingernails. She licks her lips and it grinds between her teeth._

 _The world washing into the sea._

 _"So."_

 _She raises her head and pushes herself up on her hands, twisted at the waist like a beached mermaid. Of course he's there, hands stuffed in his pockets and his hair obscuring his eyes, and of course he's probably been aware of her presence for a while. Or she wouldn't be shocked._

 _Not that much could do that. Everything that happens now feels like something she already knew. Like a story told to her a long time ago, forgotten until she was reminded._

 _"So," she echoes, and she reaches up to him. It has to be here and now. At the edge of the world, by a locked and unfound door. It feels right, as right as so many other things have felt wrong. She's as lost as he is, and that's been true from the beginning. And she was lost before he found her. Cyne or no cyne, she's pretty sure he was lost too._

 _From the beginning, there have been so many things they've been together._

 _Except alone._

 _"So," he repeats, shuffles his boots on the sand, and as he curls his fingers through hers he lowers himself into a crouch in front of her. "I guess we gotta talk."_


	28. the beast howls in my veins

**Note:** There's a song in Reord in here. The translation is at the end.

* * *

 **Chapter 28: the beast howls in my veins**

So they have to talk. But he doesn't. He doesn't speak at all.

What he does is take her hand and sit down beside her, knees slightly bent, the heels of his boots digging into the sand. What he does is stare out at the ocean, the endlessly lapping waves and the endlessly transitional sky, and with his other hand he roots in his pocket for his cigarettes.

He hasn't released her, but she slips her hand from his to allow him to go for his lighter.

And to take the pack from him, shake one out for herself. She slides it between her lips and accepts the lighter when he offers it, inhales deep and exhales long and watches the smoke dissipate. Fade. Become nothing.

He doesn't take the lighter back and she palms it as she crosses her legs, feels its cool weight. Flicks it open and closed with a soft _clink_. She's not looking at him and she knows he's not looking at her, but the fact of the matter is that in this moment they're staring at each other without a hope in any manner of hell of being able to look away.

She's a witch and the world is ending, so this seems like a good time to have a conversation about her sex life with her werewolf slave.

She no longer cringes internally when she thinks about it in those terms. It's merely funny in a profoundly grim way.

"You gonna talk?" she murmurs, wriggling her bare toes through the sand and blowing another stream of smoke at the sky. "Or are we just gonna do this for a while?"

"It's the mating bond," he says. He says it immediately, as if the words were locked and loaded behind his teeth and he was only waiting for her signal to fire. " _Heala._ It's like Scyld but more. A lot more. It starts up, it's pretty much impossible to stop. If the deal gets sealed… Well." He taps ash and smokes moodily at the horizon.

"The deal," she echoes softly. "Mating. The actual thing."

"Actual thing."

"That's why you can't fuck me."

He grunts. It serves just fine as a yes.

"Said you mated for life." She studies him sidelong; as usual his hair is obscuring a good bit of his face, but she's on his left, where he tends to be more exposed, and he seems calm. Again, moody, but calm.

She wants to touch him. Comb that hair aside, stroke her fingers through it. Stroke _him._ Nothing more.

Not right now.

"Meant it." He sighs and ducks his head, and she loses sight of him completely. "If it happens, that's it. That's… For me. Say I bit it somehow, you'd probably be able to find someone else. Not me." He pauses, working the cigarette through his fingers. It's ashing onto his jeans and he either doesn't notice or doesn't care. "For us, for Hathsta, there's only ever one person."

This doesn't seem so strange. It also doesn't seem so frightening. Serious, extremely so, but still. "You're not allowed? You wouldn't want to?"

"Wouldn't want to." He raises his head and looks at her, and his eyes are fathomless. "Can't. Like… Can't. Literally. Can't."

She says nothing to that. She's not sure what she would say. Not sure what one ever _does_ say to that kind of thing. She sees these people as animals, sees them that way constantly even when they aren't actually trotting around as wolves, but now and then she slams up against something that reminds her in a way nothing else does: These people are not human.

Nothing about them is human except the skin they choose to wear. And that part is a lie.

She's seen the truth beneath.

"You're feelin' that," she says finally. Very low. Almost inaudible over the wind - under it, really. And it's not a question, and she knows he won't take it that way. "With me. For me."

"Yeah."

Simple. Plain and direct. Whispered, just like with Rick. A breath weighted down with lead. It's heavy on him. He's been carrying it around this whole time, and she thinks about his face in the candlelight in his den, in the bars of light in her bed - the terror, the _anguish_. Pain. Real pain. The feeling, utterly inescapable, that he's at war with himself. Struggling against something, to hold it in. Like he struggled to hold his shape.

He gave in when she told him he could. Gave him permission. He gave in and changed, was _himself,_ and for him it was relief and for her it was beautiful.

And not just a relief for him. She knows that now, knew it then; it's been like this from almost the beginning. Wanting him, wanting him like _that._ He changed and something so desperately hungry inside her was _almost_ satisfied. In her bed those two times, with his fingers - that had been so good. In the shower with his tongue - even better. But when he _changed_ …

On her elbows and knees, ass in the air, begging for him. Pleading. Demanding. On her, inside her, _taking her._ She's been so empty for so long. Like that, she knows he could fill her.

"Does it only work one way?"

He had ducked his head again; now he jerks it up, his one visible eye widening slightly. "Huh?"

"Heala. Are only you gonna feel it? As it's happenin'?"

He simply stares at her. He doesn't take his eye - _eyes,_ the other one does exist even if she can't see it - off her face, but at the same time they're devouring all of her. Her whole body, every part. Ravenous. She shivers, doesn't try to stop it. Heat is pulsing into her pussy, reliable as ever - and now she understands what it is. Even if he hasn't made it explicit, it's clear. Her body is making itself ready for him.

 _In heat._

She squeezes her thighs together and she knows he sees it.

"No," he breathes. Then, as he leans forward, "You."

One word is all she needs. She nods, catches her lower lip with her teeth. She's struck with the impulse to wriggle again, and not just her toes. To climb into his lap and grind onto his cock until he gives it to her the way she's been wanting, _needing,_ if for no other reason than so her body with all its determined preparation will finally leave her the fuck alone.

"I want you like that." Without meaning to she was searching for his hand; she finds it and it's so hot she hisses in a tiny breath, grips him, and though he stiffens he doesn't try to pull away. "That way. Been thinkin' about it. For a while. I-" She swallows, blood diverted from her pussy and flooding into her cheeks and ears. It's stupid. All the shit she's done with him, utterly shameless, utterly _brazen,_ horrifying to a version of herself a year dead, but now when she tries to _tell_ him about it, she's faltering.

But he's just listening.

"On my… my hands and knees," she whispers. "I think about it and I get so wet. I'm _around_ you sometimes and I get so wet, I get so _hot_ , I-"

"I can smell you."

No surprise. No sense of sudden realization. She stares at him and grips his hand and trembles, trembles as he does, and wonders: How long has he known? How long has he been carrying this? That weight she heard in his voice, and then the way he had been leaning as Rick held him up - weary. Exhausted.

He had been so happy in her bed. In the shower. Because he was _with_ her, like he said he wanted. Maybe, that close to her and what he needs, the weight lifted just enough to allow him to breathe.

Like her.

Sitting on the sand with him, side by side, threading her fingers with his. Looking at him. _Seeing_ him.

"What do we do?"

And in unison with her, jarring and discordant: "We can't."

She blinks. That's all she can manage. They've come this far, gotten this much out in the open between them and been able to _face_ it, put words to it and exchange them - and now they're right back to this point again. "Why the hell _not?_ "

"'cause you shouldn't. Not with me." It seemed like he'd forgotten the cigarette; he remembers now and inhales deep enough to flare the coal like the hint of a sun that won't budge. "And 'cause it might kill you. And me."

She blinks again. Apparently it's her fallback. His fingers have cooled and she yanks them free, swiveling at the waist to face him more squarely, thorny bewilderment winding up inside her. " _What?_ "

But Rick. He did say. _It could hurt you. It could hurt her. Could ruin you both inside._

"It's like Scyld." Once again he's not meeting her eyes, cigarette smoldering close to the filter between his fingers. If blinking is her fallback position, his appears to be contemplation of the horizon. "Like I said. Scyld _changes_ you. Changes me, anyway. Toldja. How I was feelin', wantin' to make you happy."

He shoots her a glance. She manages the smallest nod before he returns his gaze to the sky. "Ain't never been mixed with Heala. Said that too. It's never happened this way, not ever. And Heala… Heala changes _everythin'._ You mate, you're never the same after. You're bound like…" He huffs a frustrated sigh and curls his free hand into a fist, and she can almost feel the words churning inside his head and clamoring to be let out, so many that only a few escape. "Can't describe it. I mean, I never had it. Not before you. But we say…"

He's silent for a moment. She allows him to be. She rises to her knees and sits back on her heels, close but not touching him, hands resting on her thighs. There. She wants to just be _there._ It's a simple thing to want, uncomplicated, and in that it's weirdly comforting.

And he looks at her and she can't breathe.

"When it happens we call it the _Edness a Sawol,"_ he murmurs, and he reaches up and strokes a single fingertip down her cheek. After a second or two she realizes he's tracing a stray strand of hair, and he lifts it, sets it behind her ear, removes his hand as if he's afraid to cross some kind of line. "Union of souls."

"The-"

"Yeah."

 _It._

All this time she's been wanting him rough and hungry on her, she's been wanting him arching huge and powerful over her and making her _feel_ it, claws against her hips and her belly and sharp teeth at her neck and cock big enough to split her right open, snarling as he pounds into her, fucks the _bones_ out of her. She's been wanting that. She's been so desperate for it in that rush of wet every time, the lips of her pussy plumping and her clit swelling like a bruise, thinking _in heat_ , God, she's so in _heat_ and she needs to be _fucked_ or she'll lose her goddamn _mind._

It's always been about that. But he touches her now, and he did before. Nuzzled her, licked happily at her like a puppy, and he _exulted_ in it. She felt it flooding through him with his pleasure: The sheer joy of being himself and being with her and not being afraid anymore.

She was happy too. He didn't even fuck her and she was so happy. Laughing as he held her down and lapped his own come from her belly and chest, laughing as he gathered her against him and she flicked her tongue against his. Like it was a game they were playing. Because they _were._ Ever since the second time, when he leaned over her and said _I want to,_ they've been playing. They've been together. They haven't been alone, even in that way you can be alone when someone is less than a foot away from you.

She wants him to fuck her, yeah.

But that's not all she wants.

She reaches up, catches his hand in hers. "So what's the problem?" Every syllable is gentle. There's nothing accusing in it and she's determined that there won't be. For him there clearly _is_ a problem - a big mother of a one - and she's getting the sense that they're edging closer to it than they yet have. Almost on top of the damn thing,

"This _and_ Scyld. Them together. You feelin' it too." He shakes his head slowly, gazing down at their joined hands. She's always felt that his were thick and rough, all calloused pads and scarred knuckles - _paw-like_ \- and now she sees what it really is. Yet another one of those points at which he seems closer to becoming something else. That paw-like hand becoming an actual _paw_ and enfolding hers, claws fit to slice her hand from her wrist, fingers powerful enough to crush her with a single squeeze, so big and so careful with her.

She dreams of him rough. Violent, even. A fucking animal rutting into her. But he's careful.

He would be.

"The actual thing, the… The moment of it. It, with Scyld and all those changes already, it might be too much." He hesitates, practically squirming - not with discomfort but with the sheer frustration of trying to explain it to her in a way he considers even sort of adequate. He doesn't appear to feel that he's doing very well. "Could make me crazy. _Really_ crazy. Worse. You. Or after, when it really starts workin, 'cause it's like Scyld - it's only gonna get stronger. And you're _Drya,_ and we- _That_ could be a thing, and Beth, Beth, we…"

He heaves a furiously exasperated sigh and kicks out at the sand, hurling the smoldering cigarette butt away. He doesn't release her. If anything he just holds her tighter - still careful. But she can feel how he might not be. "We don't know. We don't fuckin' _know_. Like you say. We don't know _nothin'._ We're all fucked either way."

"Can we stop it?"

She doesn't mean to ask the question. But it's an obvious one, and it would demand to be asked. From directly behind them whispers slip constantly through the keyhole, and now and then they sound almost like suggestions. Things she should bear in mind. Should want to know, even if she doesn't want what they _are._ Can we stop it?

 _Can we save ourselves?_

 _If we need saving._

He hesitates once more. Between his raised knees, his free hand is drawing something in the sand - little abstract designs, or that's how they appear to her. But she knows better than to assume. She's not sure why he would be attempting any magic now, but they're not unlike the protection sigils he drew outside her doors.

He might have any number of reasons.

"You could say no," he says at last. "That's how it usually works, when you wanna stop it. You just say no. It starts to fade after that. It _could_ be that simple, if everythin' was different."

"Different how?"

"Without Scyld." He lifts his hand, rests his wrist on his knee and lets his fingers go limp. It's a single limb, but in it she once again sees all that weariness. What he's known and hasn't told her. "You could say no, but I'd have to get away from you. Couldn't be around you. Otherwise the bond wouldn't dissolve like it's supposed to. It'd be… It'd hurt. It'd be fuckin' _torture_. And it wouldn't ever end."

He takes a slow breath. "I'm your scyldig." Her hand in his, and he cradles it, thumb gliding over her knuckles, tracing the tendons at its back. She watches him and the waves crest and come down on her, sweep her away out into an ocean from which she'll never find the shoreline. Because she knew the world was ending, understood without him having to explain, and now she understands that he loves her.

And it's hopeless. He's cursed. She destroyed him the day she saved him, and now all she can do is try to make room for it.

" _Ic beon eower,_ " he whispers. "Long as I'm breathin', I'll be by your side."

She doesn't speak after that. Neither does he, and she doesn't push him. He's returned his gaze to the water and she follows him, imagining that they've run into the waves together and dove into the surf, dove _past,_ and now they're cutting through the water easy as a pair of dolphins.

It's been a long time since she swam in the ocean. A long time since she swam at all, at least for the sheer pleasure of it. There used to be a swimming hole she went to, her and Jimmy and their friends - _friends,_ back when she had such things, before they all got together and decided she was too fucked up to be around - but she no longer even remembers exactly what it looked like.

There was a tree, gnarled with age, and a rope swing. She remembers that. It was old and frayed but they all trusted themselves to it every time. What was the worst that could happen? There was always water under them, at the end deep enough for diving. Those were magic summers, _real_ magic, when she could feel herself changing but there was such a sweetness in it. She was leaving some things behind but ahead of her was everything bright and exciting and she was _sure_ she would be all right, because she always had been. Marry Jimmy - or not, she wasn't truly certain she liked him enough for _that_ and anyway weren't there a lot of boys in the world? Before that, college. Later a house, a family, a _life_. No real idea what she wanted to do with it but she would figure it out. It was okay.

Fireflies all around them, stringing themselves through the trees like ghosts of Christmas past and future, and she hauled herself dripping from the water and cut out across the grass, drying cool in the breeze of her own speed, running and running in the night with the stars more than enough to light her way.

Her last days as as child and she had no idea.

She could ask him about a lot of other things. Should. He said this wasn't the only reason, that it's _him_ too, and that's something she really would like to understand. Suspects she needs to. But suddenly the horizon is blurring with the sky into a single pale paint-filled canvas and she's crying, trying to cover her face with her free hand, and it's worse than it was at the farm. It's so much worse. It's seizing her and _shaking_ her, sobs jerking at her breath and forcing it fast and uneven, and the world lurches and she fumbles her other hand free and catches herself on the sand, a hunched mess of snot and tears and unable to be embarrassed about it, because what's the point?

She lost everything. She lost _everything_. She's found her answers and they've only led her to more, and what they _have_ told her is horrifying. She understands nothing. She didn't want to be part of anything. She just wanted to _know why it happened_ so she could leave it alone. So she could rest.

It's not going to let her rest. She thought it gave her something and it's dangling out of her reach, covered in thorns and stings. This monster her existence turned out to be took everything away from her and it's only taking _more,_ and she doesn't believe it means to stop.

But she could crawl into the water now and let it cover her. She could lie down in the surf and let it carry her away. It's not that she wants to die. It's not that at all.

She just doesn't want to be here anymore.

 _Seft, magden_.

Huge paws on her, claws digging lightly into her back. The prickle is like the sweetest scratch down a span of skin all itches, and she sags under it, still trembling as the storm rolls through her. Like before, he's gathering her into himself, massive and powerful and so _soft,_ and she burrows into him, buries her face in his furry chest, and he combs his claws through her hair and rumbles something deep in his throat. Maybe words. She's not sure. He's warm and solid and he's closing off the world, and she doesn't find any calm and doesn't feel the need to; she cries harder, soaks his fur, and doesn't worry. He won't mind, and it's not out of any kind of obligation to accept her.

He won't mind because this is everything he wants to do. To be. He won't mind because if he can do this for her, he's happy.

He gives her a little time. But not a lot. It's difficult to tell, but it doesn't feel like much. He closed her off from the world; now he bursts wide and lets it in, and before she can wipe her face or recover any of her breath he's scooping her up, paw-hand gentle around her middle and tossing her lightly upward and over his shoulder. She realizes what he's doing just in time and grabs for his fur, grips, and then he's exploding forward with her clinging to his back, speed breaking open around her. Wind streams her tangled hair and she lifts her head, tears swept out of her eyes; he's galloping up the beach not on two legs but four, paws pounding in the sand with the water and the grass and the stone trees streaking into blurs around her.

She didn't know he could do this. She's seen him quadrupedal when he's in fierd and she was aware that he could walk that way, but not like this - this easy running, graceful in spite of his size. Above the wind she can hear him panting but there's nothing tired anywhere in it. Under her hands and her chest and belly, between her legs: The steady thunder of his heart. He'll run for as long as she wants him to run. There's nothing ahead of them but more water, more sand and grass, but that's fine. They're not going _to_ anything.

They're just going.

She lifts herself further and faces the wind, _rides_ him. Jerks his fur, urges him - _faster._ Thinking maybe he can't, maybe he's at full speed, but he finds more, and in between his gasps a snarl rips out of him that rattles into something like laughter. There's a song in it - she shouldn't be able to pick it out, but she shouldn't be able to do a lot of things. She isn't certain that it's him singing; she's actually fairly certain that it _isn't._ But it's coming to her all the same, in the wind itself - the wind they're both drawing out of the world.

 _innan se farasen a westanwind_  
 _e hela a Sumormasse_  
 _we arn, rethan wath a leoma_  
 _se dunien a forfe Mere_  
 _se bal a Alduear hleapa_  
 _ar se asce y sinite_

 _an cyne cuman, we wath se Mere_  
 _ar se asce y sinite_

She'd sing it if she could. If she knew the words. Her throat clutches itself and she wants to cry again, wants to laugh, wants to scream at the sky, and it's possible that she does all three at once.

She lost everything.

It's all right.

* * *

She doesn't stop him anywhere in particular. She mostly doesn't _care_ and she guesses he can probably tell; he swerves up onto the grass and gradually slows and drops into a trot, padding footfalls rustling. She glances over her shoulder - she can't see any sign of the others. They could have covered miles.

They're alone.

He lowers himself at the same moment she drops off him and then he's on her, batting her with a paw as she rolls into the grass. It's more than bare feet, more than years of summer evenings, and her heart is practically dancing under her breastbone as she slaps at him and scrambles to her feet and starts to run again. It's _leaping_ against her ribs as he catches her a few yards away and sends her tumbling, and she's throwing her head back and laughing as he holds her down and licks at her, takes her shirt between his teeth and shakes her gently with low growls. She wriggles and beats at him with her fists, knowing perfectly well that she won't hurt him. Mock-fighting.

Playing.

She stares up at the sky and she doesn't see that old, tired rose. She sees darkness and stars, and the ghosts of fireflies rising to meet them, and she reaches up to catch one, but instead she catches his ear, the side of his neck, and he whispers something she can't hear and couldn't understand if she did.

She was reaching for his eyes.

He _is_ pulling at her clothes. It's not just play. Nosing at her, pinning her with one huge paw over her arm, crouching and throwing her under a blanket of shadow. Hungry fingers pushing between her legs - three almost the size of his entire hand when he's human. He presses at her and she spreads for him and moans and cants her hips up, because _God yes please,_ she's so _wet_ and she's soaking her jeans and he has to smell it, cool nose and his tongue lapping at her belly when she raises herself and yanks her shirt over her head.

His glittering eyes on her. He pulls back a little; that animal gaze is taking all of her, rapt, as she unsnaps her wrist cuff without thinking, unhooks her bra and tosses it away, as she unbuttons her jeans and shimmies them and her panties down together. She might like him to rip it all off her - that might be very good sometime - but she can't exactly go back to the others in rags, even if they _do_ all know what's going on.

Doesn't matter. This is so good. Stretched out gloriously naked in the grass, naked and spread wide under him as he braces himself over her and pulls his lupine lips back into a grin. He rolls his hips down and she feels his cock between her thighs and against her hip and nudging her lower belly, and she looks and moans again: he's so fucking _huge,_ smearing glistening precome across her skin, hard and jumping in her hands when she reaches down and grips him.

He's not going to fuck her. And that's okay. He doesn't need to. He _does,_ in fact _,_ and they're going to have to deal with that, but for now the weight has left him and it's just them, rocking into each other and sighing as he grazes his incisors over the small swell of her tit and flicks his tongue against her nipple.

His tongue. His fucking _tongue,_ Jesus _Christ -_ she thought of this before and it got her off like a rocket, and now she arches and transfers one hand to his big wolf head, pushing him down, gasping _please, please, oh fuck, Daryl, please do it._

Doesn't have to clarify and he doesn't make her wait. Her words haven't even dried up before he's sliding down and cupping her ass and practically _diving_ in, swiping that long tongue over her pussy, powerful enough that he shifts her up the grass. She snaps her head back - can't help it, it's like she's coming already, clumsily lifting and looking down as she gropes for him, and a cry shoves its way through her tight throat because _look_ at that, cast in half-light and shining and pushed up on his knees like she wants to be, bent to lave his tongue over her lips and her clit and growling as he does, falling into a moan. Up on his knees with his monstrous cock in his fist, jerking at himself as he licks her, precome dripping down his knuckles and raining in clear droplets into the grass.

So wet, they're both so _wet_ , and she understands, she _gets it now_ , why her pussy is gushing her juices into his mouth. The purpose it was always serving. She's not going to have that but she can have something else, and she grips one of his ears and whines, bucks against him, hisses _fuck me, fuck me with it, fuck me now, oh God, fuck meFUCKME._

He will.

She cries out when he forces his tongue into her pussy: Long and the entire muscle stiffened; not like she knows his cock would be, not like a cock at all - at least not how she imagines - but _indescribable_ , deep and stretching her when he fattens it and flexes against her walls, licking at her from the inside, his teeth digging lightly into her mound, and he groans and lifts her like he's drinking from her, gripping her as if she might try to get away from him. But she's utterly helpless, rolling her head and keening and trying to spread herself even wider for him, hamstrings aching. He's in her like this, fucking _inside her_ , and she didn't know she could feel this way. The apex of everything he's made her feel already, every place he's taken her to. Utterly open to him as he adores her.

Filled. Not like she could be, but not far from it.

He's still flexing as he withdraws and pushes in again, not exactly a thrust but so much more than enough, curving upward and she cries _just oh fuck Daryl just like that oh my fuckin' God you_ and shatters, wrenches her body up and screams like agony and writhes, shrieking her throat raw as it slams into her every fucking time he moves in her. She can't, she can't possibly come any more but she _does_ and she feels herself pouring into his mouth, flooding like a broken dam, glimpses of him and his beautiful beast-head, massive shoulders, one paw pinning her down and his other clenched around his cock and _squeezing_ as a muffled snarl rips out of him and his come spurts in thick ropes again and again into the grass and over his fist, pouring out of him just like her. The same.

Should be inside her. Should be pumping her full of him. Accepting everything he has to give her, every bit of it so precious. Holding it. Making it hers.

 _Making._

Her head falls back and she wails again, one more time, and every one of her muscles dies, and the sky swallows her.

She lost everything and it's fine.

It's better.

* * *

He doesn't change back.

He's lying with her, curled around her and half under her, tucking her against him with his nose snuffling in her hair. She sighs and shifts and he murmurs something, strokes what she can't stop thinking of his _paw_ \- even with the presence of fingers - down her back to the curve of her ass and settles there, prickle of a claw at the back of her left thigh.

She's awake. She doesn't think she ever really slept. Faded out for a very short time, maybe, loose and somewhat sticky and fucked out even if she hasn't been properly _fucked,_ but now she's keenly aware of his size and the muscle under her palms, his chest and the mountainous slope of his shoulder and the rise and fall of his frame as he breathes. She moves her hands, runs them experimentally down through his fur, and he huffs his own sigh - deeper, rougher. Satisfied.

She felt him in fierd when he changed for her in her bed. Felt him before that when he held her at the farm. But it wasn't like this. He wasn't this softly relaxed pile of a thing, pressing a little into her hands but otherwise simply lying there and letting her do what she likes with him.

She looks up and maybe he senses it, because he raises his head and gazes at her, black and mirror-blue - he's the night, the night that won't happen here. He's come here anyway and he's carried her with him.

She takes a slow breath and catches it at the base of her throat as he raises his other paw and extends a claw toward her face, traces its tip slowly down her cheekbone.

"Lufiend," he breathes, laughs. It's also hardly a breath, a fine tremble in his core. "Thu ic bracen."

She doesn't get it. But she does. Enough. She smiles a bit giddily and buries her face in his fur, pulling him into her lungs - how he smells normally but more, darker, _stronger_. A thick scent she would describe as _wild_ because she wouldn't be able to find any other word for it. A scent like how they ran. Like how it felt when he rolled her under him and his teeth closed on her - so careful, so sharp.

She moves again - her hands and then herself - stroking him with her entire body as she maneuvers herself further on top of him. There's something bizarrely comical about the image in her own head, vaguely cartoonish - little girl trying to climb up the hill of the monster's side - and she giggles.

She has no idea when she last really did that.

"Cepan, magden." He slides an arm behind his head and watches her, lips curled slightly back, clearly amused. This time she's pretty sure she understands him perfectly well - _careful, girl_ \- and if she keeps seeing the animal in his human shape, now she sees the human in this perfect midpoint between a man and a wolf. Both. Neither.

He's entirely himself.

She pushes mostly upright, basically straddling his stomach, and it's awkward but he turns fully onto his back to accommodate her. He's so wide that he stretches her legs nearly to the point of pain, and her already taxed hamstrings send a not completely unpleasant burn seeping down to her calves. She doesn't care, anyway. All her attention is fixed on him, her beautiful monster reclining lazily beneath her, and she combs her fingers back into the fur of his chest and rakes her nails lightly over his hide.

She isn't thinking about it. She might have if he was a wolf, but as he is she still connects him more to everything human, so for a few seconds she's mildly struck by how he arches under that touch, a noise almost like a ragged purr rolling through him.

Then she gets it, and she's giggling again and digging her fingernails in, working them rapidly over his ribs and down to the upper muscles of his belly quivering beneath her. She shifts back to give herself more room, still laughing, and he's still lifting his spine into a sensual bow and making that wonderful _sound_ , and as it turns out her _werewolf slave_ likes to have his belly scratched.

There are literally no words - she'd bet in any language - to describe how delightfully ludicrous this is.

She was crying. It's not that she's forgotten that part; Christ, does she ever remember. The fist of it is clenched in her throat. There's the rest of it too. The shit he hasn't said and doesn't _want_ to say, and will have to. What they could be doing right this second, and they're not. But what she _is_ doing feels like enough for her and like it might be enough for him, and when he scooped her up and ran with her it's possible that he succeeded in leaving those things leaves behind. They're closing in, but he's bought them some time.

A breather.

He is. She's continuing her slow progress downward over his belly, making his muscles twitch and jump, and his almost-purr is roughening into something else. Edging toward a groan. She's still scratching him, but somewhere - she's damned if she could pinpoint the exact moment - she resumed her tentative exploration, and it's a lot less tentative now. The structure of his body, the shape and the logic, the way it's at once totally recognizable and utterly alien. Her hands are continuing their progress over his ribs, but her gaze is making its unhurried way over the swell of his upper body, his arms, all essentially human under the fur - and his head, which isn't human at all. Except it _is,_ not his ears or flat brow or his nose and muzzle but his _face,_ and as she wriggles further backward and her ass pushes up against something under his fur, his chest hitches and an expression passes across his wolf features that she can read perfectly well.

It hasn't been that long. But maybe he doesn't need that long.

Without taking her eyes off his face she reaches back and feels through the thicker fur there with a curious hand. She's either seen him in this form with his cock hard, or she's seen him in a situation that didn't in any way allow for this kind of attention. Now it _does,_ now they have time, and she stares down at him as he presses up under her and releases a ragged sigh, claws stroking up the top of her thigh to her hip and curving his paw against it.

She can't understand him. But he can obviously understand her without any problem. She wriggles again, feels heat pulse low into her at the silky pressure, and she squeezes him with her thighs.

"You're beautiful," she whispers, and his face twists and he looks away, eyes half closed. Whether it's simple embarrassment at any kind of compliment or whether there's something more going on, she's not sure, but she thinks it's something else she could guess at, and she moves her hand again. Petting him, heavy and slow.

"Beorht." Another whisper, but there's force behind it, and he jumps. Subtle, but she feels it - every muscle in his body tense at once. Tense and thrumming.

She does understand a little. She's always been a fairly quick learner.

"I wanna see you." She withdraws her hand; from where she is she's basically groping him, and that's unsatisfactory. "I wanna touch you." No need for clarification, she doesn't think. Not with the way he's returned his eyes to her, with what she sees in them. Anxiety. The ghost of that ferocious need - which never entirely goes away. Something else she now understands.

Eventually she might get everything.

His paw tightens, claws digging into her belly. Not painful - and in fact it sends more heat buzzing through her, a distant electric prickle. "I want to," she repeats, and covers his paw with her hand, hers soft and small over his furry and huge - and soft too. Nearly every part of him is. "Can I?"

As if he would say no when she tells him it's something she wants. But she has to ask. She doesn't think she could ever stop asking.

It matters.

"Gea," he murmurs, and his eyes flutter closed. "Magden… Besece. Ic ne…"

Looking at him, listening to the words, she can detect the faintest hint of strain, the ghost of tension. She feels it trying to solidify, become more, worse,and failing. It's like he _wants_ to be pained. Like he _wants_ this to be difficult. Because it has been, so it of course it should continue to be so.

And suddenly he's not cooperating with himself.

"You can tell me to stop," she says softly, swings her leg across him and shimmies downward over his side, settles - half sitting - between his spread legs.

Except for his head, this might be where the human in him is least present. His luxuriantly thick tail curled partially under him. The curve of his hind legs, the arch, the way they're lying - he can't stretch them out. They aren't meant to stretch. He can stand upright on them and doesn't seem to have any trouble with it, but studying them - stroking a hand down his right inner thigh to his knee - they look like they should be far more at home on a creature who walks on all fours.

But that's not what she's really here to see.

She leans over him, both hands now combing through the hair near the inner creases of his legs. It's both denser and softer here, and for the first time she really sees how it obscures what she knows is there, covering him like clothing in and of itself. But she finds it - deep in his fur her fingertips graze something smooth, mostly hairless, that gives under her touch. She cups it, shapes both hands over it - over _them,_ the heavy curves of balls big enough that it's difficult to conceive of how only fur can hide them. But they're tucked close to him, and maybe-

Abruptly she raises her head - almost snaps it up as she realizes she's pretty much forgotten the rest of him. And he's shivering, though it's hardly more than a slight tremble, his breath rougher. Tighter.

She doesn't fight back the smile that tugs at the corners of her mouth as she cups him again, weighs him in her hands, watches him stiffen. "You like that?"

He doesn't answer. He rolls his head and whimpers softly, and that's more than enough for her.

 _Way_ more than enough when she continues her expedition upward and finds his shaft.

He's half hard and he twitches when she touches him, jumping from base to tip as if seeking her hand. She parts his fur in a kind of wonder, ghosting her fingertips up his length and stopping at his foreskin, tugging gently at it and revealing the head - dark and already glistening. Jumping again when she takes him and squeezes, and she _feels_ him swelling in her palm, thickening and lengthening as his whimper deepens into a groan.

When she held him before, he was almost too thick for her to get her fingers around. Now it's easy, but she gives him another squeeze, glides down his shaft - and up and down again - and it's obvious that the ease won't last. Blood is pounding into him, beating like a heart in her hand, and she matches it with her own rhythm, stroking him slow and firm and adding her other hand to the first. He's squirming beneath her - _beneath_ her, this creature who could break her in half with all the effort of snapping a twig - breathing fast and shallow and clenching his paws into fists in the grass, and the laugh that bubbles up inside her is pure delight.

She thought about doing this. Went way beyond recognizing it as an option. Now she watches him growing _for_ her, hardening because she wants him to, and a strange and strangely exhilarating kind of power rushes through her like a wind.

 _He's yours._

She releases him to one hand and uses the other to press back his fur, ducks her head and he jerks and yelps her name as she licks up the underside of his cock in one smooth swipe.

She's not sure what she was expecting. The same softness she felt when she first took him in her hand, the same hot silky texture, and now salt and something not unpleasantly bitter on her tongue. The solid beat of his blood through a vein winding its way along him. And here at the head, flicking the tip of her tongue cautiously against the slickness around his slit, it's sweeter and milder, _good_ \- and she realizes with her own hammering pulse of heat that it's the precome she's seen dripping down his knuckles, slippery in her own hands and all over her belly as she jerked him off. She wondered and now she _knows,_ and she laps at it with undisguised eagerness, pulls his skin further down and swirls her tongue over him and shudders when she catches a welling of it from his slit into her mouth. She can _do_ that; he can literally fuck his tongue into her pussy and she can just about _drink_ from him, lapping coaxingly at him until he gives her more, until it's overflowing and trickling down over her hands.

He's moaning her name into a single infinite syllable, every part of him taut and shaking, claws clumsy in her hair and against her shoulders and back, but it never occurs to her to worry. Hasn't before and there's no reason it should now, gripping his enormous cock and licking it like a goddamn ice cream cone given that there's no possible way she gets him into her mouth. He's all hers, hers in every way that currently matters, and if making her feel good is all he wants, she's having trouble thinking of anything much better than this.

 _Beth._ All he can do. He clutches weakly at her shoulder, manages to push himself up on one elbow and stare down at her with wide, liquid eyes, jaws parted and tongue close to lolling. Panting.

" _Gyden,_ " he gasps, and something about it, the broken awe flowing through its core - reaches into her and cups her heart.

He wants to mate with her. He _wants_ that and everything it means. And it's not mere biology. It's not that he's driven to it. He is, but that's too simple, and all she needs to prove it to herself is how he looks right now. How he's gazing at her. As if _Gyden_ is her, and he can't credit his own eyes.

He's been looking at her that way for a long time.

She presses a slow, wet kiss to the base of his cock and keeps moving, dragging her lips up his shaft to kiss him again beneath the head. Again, and again, without any plan in it or any intent except the thing in itself. Every kiss is wringing something between a growl and a sob from the top of his throat, and she can't stop smiling.

Kissing his head. Licking, kissing, lost between the two, her swollen lips moving over his slit and the tip of her tongue fluttering. He whines sharply, something that feels vaguely like a warning, and it's not one she needs. Or it's not a warning, not for her.

It's a promise.

"You're good," she whispers against him. Raises her eyes and he's staring at her, _gaping,_ tongue working in his mouth as if he wants to be using it. But she's down here, she's busy, and he appears to have been abandoned by words in any language.

"It's so good." Louder as she keeps working him between her slick hands - just as wet as her. Wet to match. She laughs wildly at it, at them. At everything. "It's so good, Daryl, oh my God, you taste so _good,_ I want-"

A final desperate whine and she doesn't have to tell him what she wants because he's giving it to her, convulsing under her and howling at the empty sky as come gushes over her hands and into her waiting mouth. There's so _much_ of it, she saw it and even felt it that first time but it wasn't even _close_ to this, spurting onto her tongue with a force that startles her even as she takes it in and swallows it down. She is, she's _taking_ him, catching as much of it as she can, lapping and swallowing again and once more setting aside a tiny portion of her brain to take a sardonic pleasure in the contrast between the Beth Greene who _was_ and the Beth Greene who is _now_ , and who doesn't give a fuck.

Who's plunging a mindless hand between her own legs and rubbing her clit in furious circles, her orgasm punching into her as come drips hot down her chin.

She's a mess, collapsing against his leg and wiping absently at her face, sucking at her fingers and tasting both of them mingling into delicious indistinction like the ocean and the sky. She can hear it again - the wind hissing across the sand and sweeping through the grass, playing around them as if it's found something fascinating. Beneath it he's panting in heaves that still skirt the edge of whimpers, and once more she feels his claws through her hair and dragging down her spine when she turns to press her lips to his softening cock.

"Magden," he murmurs. He sounds stunned. "Ic ne agan leothard…" A shudder of laughter rolls through him and she loves the weakness in it. "Ic ne awierge _heasan_."

 _Yes, you are,_ she thinks, and she doesn't know why.

"Cuman." He's tugging carefully at her, paw curled under her arm, and she climbs back up and over him to his chest - and as it turns out she's shaky as he sounds. He hasn't fucked her, no, and if they ever sort this shit out and he ever does, she's not sure how she'll be able to function after.

Not _if._ It's not if. It's not something she's decided.

It just is.

She lowers herself and starts to snuggle against him but he draws her further up and before she has a chance to protest - if she even wanted to - he's licking at her hands and delicately at her face, cleaning the last of the stickiness off her skin. She closes her eyes and lets him do it, the last of the muscle tension bleeding out of her under the caress of his warm, rough tongue, but then he's touching her left wrist, lifting to give himself better access, and she freezes at the same instant he does.

The light is the kind that makes some things difficult to perceive. It can make subtle differences invisible. But he sees the pale line slashed across her skin.

 _There are things I'm not asking you,_ she thinks, and wonders if somehow it'll reach him without her ever having to speak the words aloud. _Please don't ask me this._

For a few seconds there's nothing but the faint sigh of the waves. Then he licks her, the briefest flick of his tongue, and lets her go.

This is something else that doesn't need to be spoken aloud. They ran away from all the shit back there, all the things hunting and hounding them. They got free for a little while. But they'll have to go back to it. This is an anchorpoint, their own door and the stable world around it, but they'll have to walk back through and leave everything behind.

She settles against him with her cheek pillowed on his chest, the top of her head tucked under his long jaw, and he strokes her with the thick fingers of those wonderfully rough paws, even the points of his claws somehow blunted and smooth. He doesn't say anything, and that's good. Because he was right, what he just said. She did understand. Of course she did.

He doesn't have the words.

* * *

He carries her back the same way he took her, but he doesn't run. Or he doesn't run the way he did. It's a swift gallop down the sand, but there's no joy, and none of the wildness that sharpened it. She grips his fur and lays her head against the top of his neck and closes her eyes against the stinging wind.

She's still so tired. That hasn't changed.

But she perks up pretty goddamn quick when he skids to an abrupt halt and she raises herself and sees why.

The cyne is gathered around the door, all in human form. As one they turn and stare wordlessly at the two of them. And really, she thinks as she slides down from Daryl's back, it's not as if they need to say much.

The door is open.

* * *

 _In the west wind's rushing_  
 _Hard at Midsummer's heels_  
 _We ran, the light's wild hunting_  
 _The falling of the dying Sun_  
 _The fire of Old Earth leaping_  
 _Before the ash and darkness_

 _All cyne come, we hunt the Sun_  
 _Before the ash and darkness_


	29. tell me, honey, what's the plan

**Chapter 29: tell me, honey, what's the plan**

She can't figure out exactly how they're looking at her.

At _her,_ not at Daryl, who remains silent and unchanged behind her. It's not that they're inscrutable, these people whose animal gazes are locked on her like a target; it's that she's not certain _they_ know exactly how they're looking at her, and she can think of four or five separate ways and four or five corresponding reasons why. What she now knows they all know, what they can almost certainly tell has been going on, everything they've learned in the last twenty-four hours, and now this. Which is a marvelous coincidence. This appears to be a world in which coincidences have a habit of happening, but even so.

She stares back at them. This isn't comfortable, whatever else it might be. " _What?"_

"Just opened," Rick says quietly, and glances back at the door. "Far as we can tell. Shane wandered down here a few minutes ago, saw it."

"Blinked." Shane looks genuinely bewildered, which is an expression Beth honestly never expected to see on his face. "Eyes closed, it was still closed. Opened 'em and it was open too."

"This has never happened." Michonne, low. She doesn't sound pleased. Then again, Beth isn't sure what she would even sound like if she was. "Or none of us have ever _reported_ being present for the opening of a door. We know they open, they basically have to, but."

"Yeah, well. Seems like a lotta new things are happenin'." The open door is standing between her and a clear view of what's through it, and she paces toward Rick, eyes on it. She's not sure what she _should_ be feeling, but what's humming beneath her breastbone is a kind of calm sharpness. A watchfulness. She wasn't afraid of this thing when it was closed, and now, open in this endless twilight, it doesn't feel any more frightening.

It feels like it felt before: as if this is exactly where and how it should be. As if it shouldn't be any other way.

And what it opens onto is one of the least frightening things she's ever seen.

She's seen it before, in fact. Or something very much like it. She's walked through it countless times and with special frequency as final exams approached. She's walked through it to meet friends, to study alone, to wander through it and think about nothing much, to use the computers before she had one, to look for ways to pass vacations, and several times to make out with Jimmy in dark corners, not because they needed dark corners to do that in but because there was something so deliciously exciting about it.

It's a short, whitewashed cinderblock hallway, faded beige carpet with a few suspicious dark stains, white tiled ceiling with slightly flickering fluorescent lighting.

At the end of the hallway are the spindly pillars of two sets of book detectors. Beyond them is shadow.

She looks around at them - five human faces and one huge wolf crouched behind them all - and fights back an absurd urge to laugh. But this is absurd. Laughter would be appropriate.

And at the same time, by now she knows not to trust any of what she's seeing.

"It's a library entrance." She swings her gaze back to it. There's no one in sight, and in fact the deep shadows that swallow the end of the hallway aren't at all inviting. This place is at once bland and anything but. "Or that's what it's supposed to look like."

"Supposed to," Rick echoes. He's regarding it with narrowed eyes. They all are. No fear there either, but she sees hands on knives, and she thinks Daryl probably hasn't changed back for a reason of his own. As he is, he already has knives. Five of them on each hand. In addition to being about eight feet tall. "Yeah. One by Carl's school. Glenn?"

Glenn steps forward, eyes half closed and sniffing the air - more than that. Once more, there's the sense that he's extending himself outward, occupying much more space than she can see. He shakes his head and shrugs, mouth twisted uneasily. "It's… I can't tell. It's like static. I don't know any more than any of you."

"Are we going through it?" Carol's tone is smoothed by her own kind of calm - hard, and in a way Rick's and Michonne's aren't. No apprehension, either. She's simply asking for information.

Glenn shrugs again. "The forest is too thick to get through, and I've been up and down the beach and I haven't found anything else. This? All of this?" He waves a hand at the shoreline. "It's not all one thing. It's just… You walk in one direction, it repeats itself over and over. You think you're walking in a straight line, but you're walking the same mile or so and resetting. You could walk forever and not get anywhere."

"It's the only way out," Shane murmurs, and releases a dry laugh. "Hell. We knew what we were gettin' into."

Carol cocks her head, and it's impossible to keep from thinking of an animal listening for something. "More Benescead?"

Rick's mouth thins into a grim line. "Maybe. Maybe not. In any case, not like it matters. Daryl." Looking over their heads, his voice taking on a faintly dry edge. "You wanna join us?"

She watches him change. As usual, she can't _not,_ but as he does he's abandoned all of the slow, easy sensuality he always seems to adopt around her, as if the change itself is giving him pleasure - and if he knows she likes watching him, it might be doing just that. It's like she saw when she first met the rest of the cyne: the change as something routine. To be done, not to be enjoyed.

That strikes her as something of a shame.

"Your bow's up at the campsite. Get it, come back." Brisk but not sharp, and she knows then - and was already fairly certain - that whatever else is going on, whatever other complications there are, Rick isn't going to give either of them shit for this. Rick had seemed to want desperately to spare Daryl exactly that. To spare both of them. Not angry with them.

Afraid for them.

Daryl nods, wordless, and his eyes flick to hers before he turns to obey. The message is clear enough.

 _It's alright._

"Okay, then." Rick looks meditatively between her and the door, his fingers tapping on the butt of his gun. "I guess we don't have a whole lot in the way of choices. Although…" He pauses with his attention focused on the door and the hallway through it, his fingers gone still, and Beth doubts she's imagining the odd little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Y'know, I think this might be exactly what we want."

Silence. Then Glenn, the same strange and minute smile. "Yeah. I… Yeah."

She knows better than to bother asking.

* * *

It's not just the door, she realizes as they all range around it, the campsite cleared - not that there was much to clear - preparing in an unspoken kind of way that once again involves all of them on a level she can't touch. It's not just the door regarding which she's aware of an unexpected lack of fear in herself. It's everything. It's what they've already come through. What she's fought. How she's been hurt. It's what she's lost, the total unknowns and unknowables that are even now careening toward her.

It's Daryl. It's what's between them. It's what she's been wanting and what she finally understands.

She's not afraid of any of it. Not anymore.

Her hand settles on her knife and a warm sense of power rolls through her, and when she feels him behind her the power rolls stronger and higher.

"Glenn. You're point again." Rick scans the rest of them, head tilted. "Carol, take the rear. The rest of you, stick close. And you." He points at Beth, and she raises a brow. But there's nothing in that pointing finger besides emphasis, and she'll accept it. "You stay in the middle. Whatever happens. Unless Daryl drags you out."

She gets it. She gets it immediately. It's not just Daryl being what he is and it's not just about babysitting the human in their midst. It's not really about that at all.

She has value she didn't before. Or that they weren't aware of.

Whatever. Her asking or not asking for something doesn't appear to matter one bit these days.

"Alright." He jerks his head at the door. "Let's go."

The air changes immediately as she steps through. Everything changes. It's not the awful blinding wrench of her entire being that the entry into the Benescead was, but somehow it's all the stranger for it, because it's _quiet._ It's calm. She can feel every second of the crossing, and she can feel the second her body leaves the cool breezy air of the beach and enters something warmer and motionless and nearly stale. There's no one side bleeding into the other. It's a _line_ , invisible but razor sharp, and as she crosses it she takes an involuntary breath and holds it tight, even though as far as she can tell there's no practical reason to do so.

It's just a hallway.

 _Of course it's not._

But for the worrisome darkness at the end, it really could be. She half turns, still moving, and looks back; rather than standing free the door is set into a wall of the same cinderblock as the rest of the hall. Above it is a red-lit sign that she's seen thousands of times before.

EXIT

Except at some point someone got clever, took a sharpie and wrote on a piece of printer paper and taped it in front of the E.

NO EXIT

"No fuckin' kidding," Daryl murmurs.

Glenn tosses a glance over his shoulder - tense, as much as the rest of him now. Tense more from the strain of trying to do whatever it is that he's doing, Beth is almost positive, but tense all the same. "I'm still not getting anything." He hesitates, slowing briefly. "I'm gonna just keep going till you tell me to stop. Alright?"

"Or something makes you stop," Shane mutters under his breath, and Michonne jabs a quick elbow into his arm, shooting him a glare.

"Can you not?"

He meets her gaze levelly, not missing a beat. "I can not."

No comment from the rest of them. The collective decision to refrain from doing so is palpable. _Everything_ is palpable in the unnatural stillness of the air, more noticeable all the time, and it's beginning to feel like something heavy. Air with _density._ Air not entirely amiable where lungs are concerned.

Every carpet-muffled step is slow, measured - again, taken with what feels like the result of a collective decision. That in itself is nothing especially new, but the sense is stronger now, and while every step they've taken so far has been with every reasonable expectation that something unpleasant is waiting for them at the second footfall… This is different.

The darkness is very close.

Despite what he said, Glenn pauses again as he reaches the book detector and reaches out a cautious hand, touches the smooth metal arch at the top. The muscles of his arm are tight, ready to yank back, but there's nothing. Just his fingers, the metal, and silence except for the weirdly loud sound of their breathing. As if the walls reflect more than they should.

As if this place is bigger than it looks.

"Alright," Glenn breathes, and walks between the pillars.

And vanishes into the shadows.

Another few seconds of silence. From the dark ahead, the same. As before, Beth grounds herself in the cool of the knife handle under her palm - her skin never warms it. At least not much. To her touch, it's always cool as moonlight.

Michonne takes her own breath, grips her sword, steps through. Then Shane, and then Rick and Daryl are on either side of her, Daryl's hand on the small of her back, and while perhaps she should feel penned in…

What the hell is she going to _do?_ Stay behind now?

" _Eostre gebiergewe,_ " Rick mutters, and - Carol's presence solid behind - they step past the bland metal and plastic and into the dark.

Which isn't dark at all.

Beth blinks. Her eyes had expected darkness, pupils widened in anticipation of it, and now the light she's surrounded by is far too bright. She rubs at them, glancing around and squinting - dark shapes that she recognizes as the cyne are hovering close, plus Daryl's hand remains strong at her back. But the rest of it…

They're standing in the largest single space she's ever seen.

It's not even a single space. Ahead of them is an enormous doorway, and beyond it a whole other chamber. The floor across which her boots scuffle is polished stone, a deep and brilliant green that seems to contain a multitude of other colors. The walls on either side of her are lined with pillars of the same stone, but that's all of the wall she can see - all of the wall proper, anyway. Because the walls themselves are obscured by row upon row of unlabeled shelves, rising a full four stories above her head and pressed against a ceiling of glass so clear that for a few seconds she's sure there's no glass at all.

Through the glass above them, three small moons cluster together in a clear, starless sky, blue that approaches black.

The shelves are packed to overflowing with books. The overflowing is literal. Stacks of them teeter on the polished floor beside shelves too full to accommodate any more. Some of them appear to have tumbled into piles that no one has yet picked up. More of them cover the top of a long desk a few yards to her right, even more around the legs and on the low chair in front.

The light itself - unsurprisingly by now - seems to have no source at all. It's bleeding out of the very air.

"Jesus," she breathes, and Rick chuckles, stepping past her and clapping a hand to Glenn's shoulder.

"It was."

Glenn turns, grinning - as much blatant relief as anything else. "It was."

"Not sure we should be relaxing yet." Michonne is scanning the room with narrow eyes, sword still drawn and gleaming in her half-gloved hands. "Just 'cause it looks like it, doesn't mean it is."

Rick strides forward, and while his caution doesn't appear to be entirely gone, Glenn's relief is clearly contagious. She can feel it in herself, loosening the knotted muscles in her back. This place isn't a bad place. _Weird_ , but by now that's normal, and not bad. Maybe it's lying - she now knows that places can do that - but she's close to certain. "Then we find out. We go in."

"Wait." Beth reaches back and catches Daryl's arm as the whole group starts moving in the direction of the huge entryway ahead. She's not alarmed, but. "We're not in already?"

"God, no." Carol laughs softly. Her head is tipped back, face lifted to the sky, and she looks almost happy. "If they're right, not even close. Or it's-"

" _Notes on the Collection of Incunabula._ " Glenn has halted by the desk and is holding one of the top books - slender and small, with a faded red cover - and studying the title. "The hell's _incunabula?_ "

Rick glances back and sighs. "Put it down, Glenn."

"By some guy named _Wimsey._ Someone should tell him he's missing the _H._ "

Daryl slides behind him, plucks the book out of his hands and tosses it back on the pile - not, Beth notes, completely without care. Which is something. She's not sure exactly why it pleases her, but it does. "Keep movin', little man."

Their footsteps and voices don't _echo_ , Beth realizes as they close in on the entryway - past which the space between the green pillars narrow. The sounds rise into the air and sort of _fade,_ as if they find their way to the books and melt into them. Or as if they themselves are lacking in reality compared to the rest of this place. As if they aren't quite _here._ She's about to mention it to Daryl - in part because she's not sure when she last spoke directly to him and she wants to say _something_ \- when the pillars abruptly fall away on either side and all possibility of saying anything vanishes like the sound.

They're standing at the entrance to a wide open gallery extending to either side of them. On both those sides are more shelves and piles of books - and now she can see that many of the titles on the covers and spines are not only a language other than English but written in an alphabet she's never seen before. More than one. Ahead of them is a railing of the same dark, glossy wood as the shelves. And past it…

As one they walk to it, lay their hands on it, and stare.

She's not sure how far down it is. Twenty stories? More? And up, at least as many. It's impossible to say how large the chamber truly is, because she can't _see_ the chamber, not fully. All she can see are more galleries above and below, more shelves, and between the galleries more levels, more entrances to other chambers. In front of them are towers of shelves like skyscrapers, thick enough to contain multiple interior rooms - and in fact balconies dot them, so they _must._ Staircases snake around their exteriors, swinging wooden bridges extend between them, and here and there the rickety scaffolding of a caged lift climbs. The floor is lost in shadow. Above them, the three moons turn.

There shouldn't be this many books. There can't be. Beth's hands are trembling as they grip the railing; there _can't_ be. All the books ever written in the history of Earth, all the ones that survived and all the ones lost, all gathered together in one set of shelves, surely wouldn't fill even a tenth of this place. It's a _city_ of books, an insane Escher-space of books, and it's like the Dwolma, the thinning of the universe and a glimpse of something wonderful and terrible beyond.

For some reason she can't fathom, she wants to cry.

She gasps when Daryl lays a hand on hers - she hadn't been breathing, she realizes, and he stiffens and seems about to pull away when she turns her hand and threads her fingers through his, squeezing hard.

"Gyden," Shane breathes. "How the fuck are we supposed to even _find_ her in here?"

"She'll find you."

Six bodies whirling - seven, counting hers - and seven sets of hands on seven weapons. Daryl's bow is raised and aimed, and Rick's gun is pointing, unwavering, at a small woman practically drowning in a black cloak and holding a lantern, her red hair standing in stark contrast to the deep, smooth olive tone of her skin. She blinks at them through glasses thick enough to turn her pale eyes bulbous and frog-like, and she laughs, a pleasantly rough sound.

"You think I didn't know you were here the second you stepped through the things at the entrance? Idiot boy, why do you think they're _there?_ " She steps forward, adjusting her glasses and peering up at Rick with her lantern held high. She might be eighty years old, or twenty. "Were you looking for some cozy winter reading? Maybe _Guns & Ammo?_ I have all the issues. And I do mean _all_ of them."

Rick clears his throat. The gun still isn't wavering but he is, blinking as confusion washes over him - replaced with sharp realization. He nods back at the rest of them, and he might be fighting a thin smile. "Stand down. It's alright."

"I wish it was. I know why you've come." The woman lets out a weary sigh. It's weary enough to ache in Beth's chest as she puts away her knife, and she thinks _eighty_ probably doesn't cover it where age is concerned. Probably doesn't come close. "Of course I do. I'm retired, but prophecy doesn't retire from _you._ "

"That's honestly what we were hoping," Michonne says softly, sliding her sword back into its sheath with a single graceful arc of her arm. "You know we wouldn't be here unless we had no choice."

"I know that too. So you're finally here. Like you always would be. Sooner or later we all run out of choices." The woman half turns and gestures at the book-city with the lantern. There's something sardonic in it, Beth thinks. Something that wants to be a flourish and can't work up the energy to care enough. " _Radmawath,_ Rick Grimes. I'm Pythia. Welcome to the Library of Alexandria."


	30. hope the bridges all burn your life away

**Chapter 30: hope the bridges all burn your life away**

Rick genuflects.

That's the only word Beth can think of, and it's bizarre - the word and the action both, so in fact they fit each other just fine. What he does with his hand and head is actually more complicated than that, and she suspects she's seeing a more nuanced message than merely a greeting - even a respectful one - but it also doesn't matter. At least not stacked up against so many other things.

 _Pythia._

Beth isn't sure what she expected an oracle to be like, but this isn't it. Flowing robes, maybe. Cloak. Lots of beads. Weird tattoos. Possibly glowing eyes - though Pythia's lantern is indeed catching her glasses at just the right angle to make them flash and beam. _Taller._ Though the woman's presence seems to extend far beyond the space her body occupies.

She definitely didn't expect a damn librarian.

Pythia is waving an impatient hand. "Drop the formalities. Like I said, I'm retired. Haven't talked to any gods of any kind in a long damn time."

Michonne arches a brow. "No one else comes here?"

"Why would they?" Pythia snorts a laugh and gestures over the railing at the chasm of books. Her sleeve falls away from her hand, revealing a long golden gauntlet decorated with a series of flaming suns. "What's here for them?"

"Oh, I dunno." Shane sounds faintly incredulous. "The knowledge of a thousand worlds might be worth a _little_ somethin', you'd think."

"We live in both interesting and foolish times, boy. Plus, to be honest, I'm not exactly eager for anyone to find this place. You got to the door. You saw how easy the trip is? If I wasn't expecting you I'd be frankly amazed any of you are still breathing. Then again." She lowers her lantern and turns, passes between Beth and Carol to the railing where she stops and rests her hand. She smells powerfully of dust and kerosene and old incense, and the scent lingers in Beth's nose after she walks by. "Needs must. And there are a hell of a lot of devils driving right now."

Rick steps forward. The others hang back and Beth hangs with them; if they're content to allow Rick to handle this business on his own, so is she. It might be nice to stay out of things for once. Even if she has the wearily unpleasant sense that this concerns her in the most fundamental way possible. "If you know why we're here, you know how bad things are out there."

"Yes." She sighs and doesn't look away from the towers in front of her. "I keep tabs. I can't not. They're holding more of the city. You're getting pushed out of your own territory and your hunts aren't doing much to put a dent in any of it. I see it very well."

"Then you know we haven't-"

"Been able to make contact with any of the other packs. I know that too."

Michonne doesn't move - she holds her usual wide, strong stance, arms crossed - but she speaks, low and firm. "Can you tell us if they're alive?"

Pythia shakes her head. Her face isn't visible, but the weariness is plain in her voice as it drops into something rougher. Her age has been impossible to place, could be anywhere on a very long spectrum, but now she sounds ancient. "I can't. And no, I don't know. Some things are hidden from even me. Especially since I don't get the divine scoop like I used to."

"That right there is a problem," Rick says quietly.

"That it's hidden? Yes. It is. But even if I did know, there are things time and space constrains me from saying. I don't like it, but believe it or not, the multiverse has never been very accommodating regarding my _preferences_." At last she turns to them, the lantern throwing odd shadows across the floor and the faces of the others. Beth glances back at Daryl; once again he appears far more lupine than human, and she thinks about the candlelight in his den, looking at him that first time and beginning to see some things she hadn't before. Eventually many things, in that light. "You want to drag me out of retirement. Get a prophecy. Yes?"

Rick nods.

Pythia points at Beth, and her eyes - when they hit Beth's - are burning even through her glasses. If anything her glasses intensify the effect. "About her."

"Among other things. She's-" He shifts his focus to Beth. She can tell he's remembered what she said, what she was sick of, and she feels a small measure of gratitude for it. " _You're_ one of the big parts, yeah. A witch walkin' the world again. Centuries after the war. That's worth understanding."

"It is." Pythia steps past him; all at once and with surprising swiftness she's approaching Beth, raising her lantern again, and Beth feels Daryl edging forward, senses the beginnings of a growl rumbling above his diaphragm. She puts a hand back, touches his arm, and then Pythia is barely inches from her, the warmth of the lantern close enough to feel on her cheek.

"The last Drya. Yes. Like something out of a bad film, isn't it? A title, even." She tilts her head slightly, magnified eyes scanning Beth up and down. Abruptly her gaze seems to recede into her own head, growing distant and unfocused, and the lantern swings. The cyne are watching but they might as well be football fields away. Just like with the muse. This keeps happening - people pulling her aside from the world and _studying_ her. And when Pythia speaks next, her voice is softer and more distant than even her gaze; it sounds as if it's arriving through a long tunnel with poor acoustics.

"The seed of the dead rests in the blood of the living."

No one says anything. Everyone is waiting. _Daryl_ is waiting, though whether he's waiting for the same thing they are is another question. Somehow Beth doubts he cares as much about a prophecy right now and far more about someone he doesn't know getting up close and personal with her.

She appreciates that.

Pythia appears to refocus, snaps back into clarity. The corner of her mouth twists in what looks like grim amusement. That seems to be going around lately. "I don't know how much I can deliver in the way of prophecy. But child, if there are things you need to understand - and I'm sure there are - I believe I can help you with that. _You._ It's you I'm here for. If the race that killed your people benefits, it'll be because you do."

Behind her, Rick frowns. He doesn't look especially comfortable. Beth doesn't blame him; no one has been inclined to say much about this, least of all her. It hasn't felt like her story. History or no, these aren't the creatures who _killed her people_. "We were thinkin' this would be a sort of _everyone wins_ thing."

"If anyone wins. It may be too late for that." For another moment, she remains - motionless, unblinking, and Beth doesn't look away. She's not being held. At least she doesn't think so. It's something she's _doing,_ and she's almost proud of herself for it.

She's a stranger here. But if everyone is right, she's also not. And it's beginning to feel as if it might really be true. Both things at once.

 _The seed of the dead rests in the blood of the living._

At last Pythia nods, apparently satisfied with something, and moves back, turning once more and holding out her lantern to illuminate the dimness of the gallery ahead of them. It's not so dim that they wouldn't have been able to see, but there's something faintly comforting about the lantern's glow. "All right, then. Come with me. I can't get my hands in the timestream here. Not the way I need to."

She heads off down the gallery, again moving swiftly, and after half a minute's pause Rick shoots a look over his shoulder, jerks his head at Pythia's receding back. The rest follow him without hesitation, and as she walks beside a wordless Daryl, Beth figures that at least one upside of this whole thing is that someone actually seems willing to give her some real answers.

Or at least she's prepared to hope. A little.

* * *

Somehow it's even larger than she saw.

They had a good view from the gallery's railing, and to the extent that she was able, she thought she had a handle on the vague dimensions, the sheer immensity of it. Exactly how shaken to her core she should be, the degree of shaking and the depth to which it sunk. But as Pythia leads them past more shelves and to a narrow staircase, then another and another, crisscrossing along the chamber's wall, it becomes clear that she had no goddamn _idea_.

She'll never understand how big this place is. It can't be understood.

More than that, space itself doesn't feel as if it's working in a way she's familiar with. Somehow distances aren't consistent, and what she thought was far away turns out to be much closer, whereas a landing that seemed only seconds below them turns out to take minutes to reach. They descend and descend, and she's dizzy and and tipping slightly, one hand braced on the rail.

At least there _is_ a rail.

Again, Daryl's hand is steadying on her shoulder, and without thinking she reaches up, closes it over his. He gives her a squeeze and she hears him laugh softly.

If he can laugh like that, things must be at least sort of okay.

"I gotta put you on my back again?"

She grins. It feels tight and a little strained but it's still a grin. She's not looking over the rail or out at the chasm of books; she's focused straight ahead, one foot after the fucking other, Shane's broad back directly in front of and below her. She's fine. Everything is fine. If nothing else she can fall on him and she thinks he would probably cushion pretty her well even if he would be absolutely furious.

"You change to that, you're not gonna fit on this thing." And in fact it's creaking as they walk down it, and she's trying to not think about that either. She doubts Pythia is suicidal, and no one seems suspicious about being led into a trap, but even so.

"Be surprised. I can deal with tight spaces."

"Oh, really," Glenn mutters from behind him - sardonic and dry as a desert floor - and as it hits her why, she has no idea whether or not she should laugh.

No idea whether or not she wants to.

How they all actually _feel_ about what they certainly know is going on remains largely a mystery to her. Not _good._ That's all she knows.

But if Glenn can joke about it. Even crudely. Gallows humor and all, but. Either way, Daryl doesn't respond.

Then abruptly they're leveling out and turning on another landing, and she sees with a lurch in the pit of her stomach that they're stepping out onto one of those swinging bridges that extends to an enormous tower, already shifting under Rick's weight. A stiff breeze whistles up from beneath them and tugs at her hair, and the smell of dust and old paper is abruptly overwhelming. She can't keep back a tiny groan, and there's Daryl's hand again.

"Don't like heights?"

"Don't like fallin'."

"Ain't gonna fall." He pauses. Then, quietly: "Ain't gonna let you."

In fact, she doesn't even know how far down it is. _Not as far as it was_ is about the best she can do, but she knows that if she looked back and up now - she is _not_ going to do that, there is just no fucking _way_ she's raising her eyes from what's directly ahead and at her trembling feet - she would no longer be able to pinpoint where they started from. The floor below them - as of the last ill-advised peek she took - remains lost in shadow.

Even the Dwolma wasn't like this. That void that seemed miles deep and was probably more, below which another universe seethed and surged - it didn't send nausea rolling through her this way. With the Dwolma there was endless space. Here she feels it all closing in, the towers above threatening to topple onto her even if she isn't looking at them.

This place is beautiful. But it's also probably the most terrifying place she's ever been in.

"What the hell _is_ all this?"

She doesn't realize she's spoken aloud until Shane answers her over his shoulder, his voice hushed and surprisingly patient. "Collection of the knowledge of all worlds. Least all the ones we know about. _She_ knows about. Every culture, all history." He falls silent for a few seconds. "Every race. Includin' yours."

 _Yours._ She's shaking her head before she means to. Not in denial - or not only. It still doesn't feel right. It does, it feels _true,_ but it also doesn't fit. Behind the veil, maybe. _Weird,_ maybe. Clearly she lost all hope of being normal a while ago. But not this, this defined position in what this world appears to be. This _heritage_ that apparently exists and which she never asked for. Never looked for.

She didn't want to understand herself. She wanted to understand what _happened._

Somehow never expected them to be one and the same.

"We're not actually in the Benescead anymore," he says, and she starts slightly. This is far more elaborate of an answer than she expected, and far more amiable. Though his voice is run through with the tension he's been carrying since they got here. "We're in the _Oferscead_. The Over-Scead. Top level. From here you can get… pretty much anywhere. If you know how and you're strong enough to do it."

She thinks of the door. _NO EXIT_. "You've been here?"

Glenn breathes a laugh. "Yeah, no. None of us have ever been here. Can't. This path isn't normally open to us. And it would be too dangerous."

"But you knew it would be open now?"

"We hoped." He pauses. "We didn't have much of a choice. The world's dying. _We're_ dying."

She doesn't answer. She's not certain what she would say.

But by this time they're well over two thirds of the way across, and at least it's taken her mind off that much of it. She squints down at the worn wooden planks - and that's a _huge_ mistake, because there are gaps, _of course_ there are gaps, and she snaps her gaze back to Shane and grits her teeth and forces her legs to move.

And another step, and she's standing on solid floor again, detaching her eyes from where she's locked them and scanning her surroundings.

They've halted in a chamber cut into the center of the tower. It's circular, both larger than she would have expected and curiously devoid of books. The floor is all strange, pale stone, worn to the point of polish and shining in the lantern light. Not only the one Pythia is carrying; a bigger lantern hangs from the high ceiling, the brass-toned metalwork a cage of swooping abstract lines that almost take coherent form. But that's not what catches Beth's attention. Not in the end.

What should by rights have been a long curving wall lined with shelves is instead a long curving wall covered floor to ceiling with a brilliantly colored mural, colors so bright the thing looks new. Brighter, even; no paint should look like this, shades and hues so unnaturally vivid. She turns her head, following it, and has to blink and fight the urge to lift a hand and shield her eyes. Around her she's dimly aware that all of them are doing the same - all except Pythia - but the rest of her takes no notice. She turns more than her head; as she spins slowly she's already dizzier than she ever was on the stairs, a vertigo gripping her that has nothing to do with height or distance.

Again she thinks of the Dwolma.

It begins around the doorway: a fantastically complex landscape packed with more than she would have thought possible in the space given. The actual details must be _tiny_ to fit, but she can see them with perfect clarity. And at the same time they slide past her, slippery and moving too fast to fully take in; they _are_ moving, rivers and fields and forests and wide deserts, the rise and fall of mountains, and cities, countless cities, enough there to house millions if not billions of people. Gleaming towers of glass and steel, places that look a little like Atlanta and look nothing like Atlanta at all, places that don't look like any city she's ever seen. So much bigger, the architecture somehow profoundly alien, the elevated rail of a sleek train. Herds of horses, cattle, antelopes, packs of wolves, lumbering things that might be dinosaurs. Oceans full of whales. People walking, running, driving cars and things nothing like cars in the least. Things flying overhead, things that might be planes and might be birds and might be something completely other, soaring and careening through racing clouds. Plumes of smoke. Fires and explosions caught in mid-blast. Mushrooming clouds. Masses of shadowy, shambling figures that almost look human and look nothing of the kind. More cities reduced to ruins. Deserts again. All of it plunging away from the door and toward a central point on the opposite end of the room. So of course she ends up there, facing it, and she's much closer than she had realized. She _wasn't_ this close a second ago. She knows she wasn't.

She doesn't want to be this close.

Standing there, staring upward, she wraps her arms around her middle and beats back a thick shiver.

She's looking at a great dark tower rising from a field of roses, backed by a sky the color of old blood.

"Terrible, isn't it?"

Pythia, what feels like inches from her ear. She jumps and an alarmed squeak bursts out of her. She's immediately pissed off about it, ready to whirl and snap, but she's also still shivering and it's not getting better. If anything it's worse every second. She swallows hard, and with tremendous reluctance but an urge she can't hope to deny she looks back at the mural, and her breath ices over in her chest.

"Terrible and wonderful," Pythia whispers, and she sounds sad. "More than anything else, those two things. Terror and wonder are what it all comes down to, aren't they? In the end we look at everything in existence and that's all we can feel."

"What is it?" Her own whisper, she's sure. But it doesn't sound like her at all. It's too soft, too high. Too much like a child's.

"Your people called it the _Anwaldtur_. The Tower of All Worlds. Which their people call it as well." Beth catches the glance Pythia tosses over her shoulder, at things unseen - not unknown. She's looking at the others, and Beth isn't sure she wants to know what Pythia is seeing there.

All at once, everything feels dangerous. Massively so. Far more than it has. Not in the sense of the Benescead, the feeling that the world is malleable and full of holes and liable to break apart under your feet and hurl you into a chasm with no bottom and no end, or tear you the fuck apart for no reason other than that it's possible. That was senseless danger, and ultimately even when she was in the worst of its grip, she knew there was no intelligence behind it. It was a mindless threat.

There's a mind behind this.

The tower is fantastically detailed, even more than the rest of the mural. She can't hope to count the levels, but on each one the shapes of windows are picked out with stunning distinction. Some way up from the ground there's a balcony, very small, and on it - even smaller-

Flash of red - _crimson_ \- and she gasps and jerks backward.

Pythia lets out an irritated grunt as a dark blur shoves her aside, and then Daryl is pressing close, gripping her shoulders and turning her to him. She doesn't fight him, doesn't yank herself away and insist that she's fine; her muscles aren't responding properly, none of her nerves reporting in the way they should, and even as she faces him her head is angled toward the mural. Toward the tower, her gaze sinking into it as if she herself is the paint.

The red. And then, below it in the field of roses, three tiny figures.

Approaching.

"Beth?" His rough hand on her jaw now - gentle, as always, but he's trembling very slightly, and she doesn't have to focus on him for more than half a second to see his alarm. "Y'alright?"

She nods. It's slow and still a bit numb, but she makes it happen and it doesn't feel like a total lie. "I'm… It's just…" She glances at the tower again, but this time it slaps her eyes away rather capturing them, and she squeezes them shut and drags in a quivering breath. "I don't like it." Again it's that irritatingly childish whisper, but it also sounds like the truest thing she could say, in the truest possible sense.

She hates it. Hates everything about it. Its awful blackness, the way it stabs that nightmare sky. Hates the figures moving toward it, the blood-sea of roses. Most of all she hates the minuscule flash of crimson on that high balcony.

 _He's trapped,_ she thinks. _He's trapped - but not trapped enough._

"Good. It's not for you. Not in your world, anyway." Pythia again, nudging a slender hand between them and curling it around Beth's arm. Daryl growls, sudden and thick, but Beth shakes her head and touches her fingertips to his chest, and the growl subsides, though it doesn't entirely vanish. She doesn't think about doing it. It's instinctive. Another one of those moments when she _is_ with him in a way she's not sure she chose and isn't sure she completely likes.

Though she likes it more than the tower.

Pythia tugs her, and she allows herself to be tugged. She's being guided away from the mural and back toward the group, and that's _more_ than okay, though she's not sure she's altogether comfortable with how they're looking at her. It's not by any means the first time that's happened, but there's something new about this. When she was told she was a witch - when she took the blade to Shane, and he _must_ have suspected something then - they seemed remarkably calm about it. There was shock under the surface, but more than anything she had sensed in them a grim eagerness to leap on whatever she meant and use it to claw themselves forward. However that might happen. Whatever she really _means_.

Now they're looking at her as if they're not sure they want to get too close to her.

Except Daryl at her back - his place now, she thinks, and with more certainty than she has before - and close and warm, the potential presence of his hand at her shoulder almost as palpable as the thing itself.

He'll be close now. He'll always be close. She understands.

Pythia releases her and steps forward. "Rick Grimes, what do you know of the tower?"

Rick chews his bottom lip, head slightly tilted. His hand is hovering nearer to his gun than it was, the hint of a curve in his fingers as if ready to grab and draw. Not eager. But ready. "Lore says it's the center of everything. Every world."

"What'll happen if it falls?"

"The end," Shane murmurs. "Of all those worlds. Every one."

Michonne's lips tighten, pensive. "Are you saying it's about to?"

"I'm saying its fate is not completely untethered to yours. Though as I said to your little witch here-" Pythia shoots Beth a look and Beth bites back the urge to demand that people stop _calling_ her that. "-in your world it's not for her. It's not for you either, Rick. Or your cyne. What's left of it." Rick is frowning, opening his mouth to respond, but she sighs - abruptly exasperated - and tramples whatever he had been scraping together.

"The Atlanta cyne used to be strong, in numbers and blood. Now you're a tiny pack of outcasts and mongrels. You remember." Her eyes narrow as she stares Rick down, her lantern dangling loose in her grip. "Even in your father's day it wasn't entirely untrue."

Rick was frowning. Now his lips are pulling back from his teeth as a low growl swells in his chest, and he's not the only one; Beth surveys them all, fighting back alarm, as their heads dip and their mouths twist into snarls. Even Daryl, stepping forward from her back to her side, his hand on the strap of his bow.

"I don't give a shit who you used to be," Rick says, and his voice is very quiet and very dangerous. Might be a bluff. But she really doesn't think so. "I don't give a shit what you can do. I don't give a shit that we _need_ you. You come at our _arweor,_ you come at us."

Long silence, but for the growls, deep and sustained, coiling into tension that makes the air hum. Once again Beath realizes her hand is on her knife, and the realization lurches in her gut. They're always on the edge of fighting, these people. Have to be. She's been keeping to herself for a year now, keeping her head down, but then she drew her knife and fed it blood, and she should have known it would bring her here.

They're always on the edge of fighting because they aren't people at all.

But at last Pythia breathes a laugh and dips her head, gives it a single amused shake. "So there _is_ still some fire in you. That's good. That's very good." She raises her head and her jaw sets itself into something hard and sharply lined. "Far as _mongrels_ go, mixed blood is always stronger. So they say. You have a motley crew, Grimes. It's a motley world. Might be the best chance you have now."

She turns to Beth, expression both speculative and interested. "And you. You also."

"So _how?_ " Shane raises his hand and lets it fall in a gesture of profound impatience. "Rick, c'mon, let's cut the bullshit. How exactly is she a chance? A chance for what? We got all these theories, sure, but what the fuck does it _mean?_ "

"Shane," Michonne murmurs, but he ignores her, turning on Rick and practically twitching with irritation.

"We came all this way for a prophecy. Right? Let's get the fuckin' prophecy and get _outta_ here."

"You want your prophecy?" The words are quiet, soft, but only a thin covering for a razor's edge. Pythia is still looking at Beth, eyes boring into her, and Beth swallows. It's not the same scrutiny she's been subject to before. It's a hand reaching out to her, somehow both ruthless and unbearably gentle. She hears the woman in her head, and there's no way it's overactive and overtired imagination.

 _I'm sorry, girl. I'm sorry for everything that's coming now._

Rick inclines his head. The veneer of respect has replaced itself - and maybe a veneer is all it ever was. "He's not wrong. You know it. That _is_ what we came for."

Pythia breathes another laugh and turns away from all of them, moving to the center of the floor and looking down. On entry, Beth perceived the thing as essentially unremarkable, but now that's clearly not the case. It's cut in a series of joined spirals into a complex latticework radiating out from a central point - a point on which Pythia is now standing, setting her lantern down by her feet and facing a part of the mural that depicts a sun bright to the point of being subtly threatening. Beth looks from it to her and back to the others, who remain unmoving. Calm, maybe, but there's nothing relaxed in their lack of motion.

And there's Daryl, hand brushing hers. Always with her. Always touching.

"You say you want a prophecy," Pythia says, still softly, not shifting her gaze from the mural. "That's what they all used to say. They all came to me and none of them went away happier in the end. Oh, sure, a few. There are always exceptions. But for the most part…" She raises a hand and removes her glasses, pinches the bridge of her nose. "For the most part they weren't better for knowing the future. Futures in general aren't helpful. Neither are pasts, if it comes to that. Kings and heroes came to me, asking for _prophecy_ , and I don't think I _helped_ hardly any of the lumbering idiots."

She looks over her shoulder at them, at Rick, her uncovered eyes clear and shining. "Now here _you_ are. Your world is moving on, so you don't have a choice. Miracle dropped right into your lap and you have no godsdamned idea what to do with it."

"Can you tell us?"

"I can tell you some things. I can…" She falters, and Beth realizes the shine in her eyes is gathering tears, and her throat locks up and she's not certain why. There's no reason she can perceive for her to want to cry for this bizarre stranger who as yet she has no reason to like and very many reasons not to.

But there's so much age here. And so much weariness.

"I can give you what you think you want." Pythia draws a huge breath, her head tipping back and her eyes closing, her mouth falling open and the muscles of her face smoothing out into something between peace and slow ecstasy. The sun in front of her is brightening, only gradual but in a few seconds impossible to miss, and in a few more Beth has to raise a hand to shield her eyes. They all do, cringing away, and as a wave of warmth spills over them, Pythia begins to speak.

Not in her own voice. Or not only. It's _doubled,_ a voice beneath hers, deeper and more resonant and neither masculine nor feminine. It's _beautiful,_ Beth thinks, hideously so, and she wishes suddenly and desperately that she had a second set of hands to cover her ears with.

Daryl. With a flicker of black amusement Beth wonders if she could get him to lend her his, if he wasn't almost certainly facing the same dilemma she is.

But then Pythia is speaking and it doesn't matter.

 _Richard Grimes. Last of the line of the Atlanta Cyne. Last eal of your generation. Last leader of your pack. Landless lord and childless father and crownless king._ She mutters to herself for a few seconds, then her double-voice rolls through the room like thunder. _Today is when your first great trial begins. Yours and that of your cyne, for what one of you faces all must face. You and the last Drya - you have all been hunters. Now you, with her, will become the hunted. They come hot on the trail of your lone mountain wolf, slavering for blood. They will have it, before the end. But so will you._

They all stand there, frozen. Beth feels it literally: She can't move at all. The bright network of her nerves has gone dark. In its place is only cold solidity. The entire room has been blown full of a deep chill, except for the now-blazing sun. She wants to curl in on herself, to scream. It seems appropriate. But her jaw only works silently. Nothing else.

All the inevitability of a nightmare. As always.

Pythia is turning now, inch by inch, and raising a hand to point at Rick. To point at all of them. Her face is as stony as her voice. Her eyes are completely white, blind and blinding as the sun. _This is not a battle you can win. Not as you are. But there are other battles. A war is not won or lost in a single one. And there are other ways of fighting._ She hauls in a huge, rasping breath. All at once she's beckoning to Beth, bizarrely frantic, and when she speaks next it's her voice again - only hers - and her eyes are wide and wild.

"Bring her to me. Now, girl. You. Your knife." She swallows and hunches, breaks into a fit of coughing. "You're the last. You have to know."

Finally she can move. She can work her legs; they remember how and what they're for, tingling like she's been sitting on them for hours. She manages a step backward and then another, her shoulders falling against Daryl's broad chest. "No."

"You _must._ " Beseeching. Pythia flicks her hand open and closed, grasping at the air. "Come _on,_ girl. For the sake of all your mothers. You don't have much time."

"Time for _what?_ "

At the same moment, Daryl pushes forward with his now-familiar growl rising into something nearer a snarl. "She ain't goin' nowhere."

"If you want her to live, you'll bring her here." Pythia's mouth wrenches into a pained grimace and she staggers, suddenly appearing to only barely keep her feet. "And blood." She points to the floor, to the center on which she's standing. "We need blood… to complete it."

"Daryl." Rick, frightened under the steel in his own voice. Solid and large as his gun. "Beth. Do it."

There's a place beyond bewilderment and beyond fear, when the two come together and you can rise above it all and see everything clearly - aware of paralysis but not _in_ it. She knows that. She's not sure exactly _how_ she knows, but she does, and when her gaze swings crazily from Rick to Daryl to Pythia's blazing eyes, she knows she's there.

 _Blood._

If she waits until she understands something to do it, she'll never do a fucking thing.

She lunges forward - quicker than she would have believed she could - and draws her knife. Daryl's fingers graze her arm as a thin, stricken noise rips out of him, but she's past him before he can catch hold, though she's positive she feels the ghosts of claws on her skin. Everything else is fading, sinking into a dim indistinctness; there's only Pythia and the horrible sun behind her, and silver like ice pressed into her palm.

She needs this.

"Tell me what I have to do."

"Blood," Pythia croaks, and Daryl is there between them as if he has been all along, dark and inhuman and somehow huge, and holding out his arm with his wrist up.

"Take it from me."

Pythia's attention snaps to him, flickering with surprise like a sparking fire. "Freely given?"

"Freely given."

She seems to consider for a few seconds. Then she nods, reaches for Beth's hand and closes around it like a vise before Beth has a chance to do anything at all, to jolt her clumsy, stupid body back into motion. A gold sheen gilds the knife's blade as Pythia wrenches her hand and then yanks it down and across in a single slicing motion, and Daryl lets out a strangled yelp as glittering red blooms in a neat diagonal line and his skin begins to sizzle.

Beth gapes, her hand falling numb to her side, voices rising behind her. Inconsequential. All that matters is the man in front of her, face screwed up in agony, clutching his dripping arm and doubling over as an awful whine forces itself out through his bared teeth.

"Daryl," she whispers, and she's staggering forward, lifting her free hand and reaching for him with nerveless fingers and the knife forgotten - and she has time to glance down and see his blood flowing into the swirling lines carved into the floor, when Pythia touches her temple and the sun swallows her whole.

* * *

Chaos. Rush of time, space; she can recognize it as such. Carried by it like a twig in a flood, she watches the blurs as they hurtle past. Fragments. Shards. She feels only bemusement, and no surprise whatsoever at any of it. She's always known. Birthdays and holidays and summer picnics. The rope swing and the delightful jumping-tickling in her belly, arcing out and back. The tumble off the horse and her broken ankle and Mama's bloodless face. The birth control pills and the pond and Maggie flushed and furious. Climbing trees, scaring birds, shrill cries and her palms scraped by rough bark. Eggs small and perfect in her palms, warm little pebbles. Sunlight on tall whispering grass. Her first clumsy kiss. First time watching dogs mating and understanding everything. Christmas dawn and huddled on the stairs. Easter lilies on the altar. Thanksgiving stomach cramps. Sleepover whispers in the dark. Warm, wet soil in her hands and packed under her fingernails, sting of rose thorns in the pads of her fingers. Blood in the crotch of her panties. That farmhand one summer and his broad back, his powerful arms - like _him,_ very much not unlike _him_ \- and lying in her bed at night with her fingers slipping between her legs and her climax like a blast of revelation.

Moonlight, and a pale lady all in white rising above her. Beautiful. Terrible.

Singing.

Blood like spilled ink.

Rising out of bed. Drifting down the stairs, shadows on the wall. Torn flesh, gleaming teeth, rolling eyes, claws dripping red. Red trickling down the walls. Red pooling on the floor. Red. Everywhere, grinning like they couldn't stop grinning out of a pit of insanity too deep to ever emerge from, crawling toward her, still chewing pieces of an arm. A meaty chunk of thigh.

Daddy's head.

Fire in her chest. In her skull. Her heart, bursting into enraged flames. Pulsing into her palms, her fingers, scorching from the inside out. Licking up her wrists, eager. Clenched fists and screaming, screaming above the roar of the fire and the agonized hisses and shrieks of the things as she hurls bolt after bolt of searing light, endless and boundless like her rage and her grief, which are only hopelessly inadequate words for something that burrowed into her like a parasite and will never leave her. Blackening their skin. Melting fat. Ragged claws scrabbling the floor as they fall and writhe, convulsing as the flames force themselves into their gaping throats and explode their bellies, and Daddy's head in her hands and running, _running,_ blind with steaming tears and stumbling down the porch steps and sprinting across the grass as heat pounds her back, and cradling him, because she can do it, she _knows_ she can, because it's in her and it always has been and if she's carrying fire she's carrying other things as well.

But she wasn't. And she couldn't. And she didn't.

She fell, and everything burned.

* * *

She comes back with an enormous gasp that rakes down her throat, and collapses to one knee, looking wildly around. There's light - the swinging lantern overhead - bizarre shadows dancing on the walls and _them_ staring at her with wide, stunned eyes, Rick starting forward and Carol following close.

But there's a body hunched beside her, kneeling, and as she turns toward it, it uncurls and raises a dark, shaggy head and lifts a hand still dripping with blood, blood streaming from a long cut the edges of which are blackened and crisped. Burned.

Trembling. Terrified.

She crawls to him, drops the knife and gropes for him, and as she pulls him clumsily into her arms he's already there and pressing so tight against her, enfolding her like he did at the farm - except he's not doing it only for her. His breaths are coming in shuddering sobs and he's whispering her name into the hollow of her throat, and she knows he's bleeding all down her back as he clutches her and she doesn't give a shit.

There always has to be blood.

 _The seed of the dead._

A shadow falls over her and she looks up, blinking; a dim shape coalesces into Rick, standing there and studying her, and Carol dropping into a crouch beside them and laying a gentle hand on Daryl's back.

Rick's voice is hoarse. Wound tense, fear running all through it like veins. "The _fuck_ just happened?"

Pythia comes to her like a dream, out of a haze that seems to split her off from everything else. Distant and unreal, and far too large. She made a world and now she fills it, and Beth is still locked inside. "She received her prophecy. Her revelation."

"And you had to almost kill 'em to give it to her?"

"Rick," Carol says softly, glancing up. "They're alright. Both of them."

 _No._ "No," she murmurs, and presses her cheek to the crown of Daryl's head, tightens her arms around him. So strong and so solid against her, so warm. The most real thing in the room.

 _Lufiend. My love._

"No." She closes her eyes, drawing a seething red darkness over her. Deeper than blood. "I set the fire. Called it. In my hands." She breathes, and the air is choked with smoke and ash, and tears carve down her cheeks. "I burned it all down."

* * *

 **Note:** Yes, that's Stephen King's Dark Tower in the mural. :D


	31. they used to shout my name

As always, thanks for your patience. I will say that this thing is cooperating a lot more than it was, so I don't think I'm in any danger of losing it. Though I still don't think I'll be updating it super fast. Everything Where it Belongs remains a lot easier.

There was a cool thing I wanted to do in this chapter. I decided to save it. You won't be sorry. I think what's left is still pretty cool.

There's some Reord spoken in here. I'll add some pertinent words to the guide (dynamicsymmetry dot tumblr dot com / post / 129733980656 / howl-a-guide) but in the interest of your convenience I'll also translate in the end notes. For those of you slightly hazy on what Daryl looks like in fierd, here: dynamicsymmetry dot tumblr dot com / post / 138053524206 / looking-for-howl-images-and-i-thought-this-was. As I say there, size difference is pretty much right.

God, I fucking hate this site, there is no genuine fucking reason to disallow hotlinking)

❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 31: they used to shout my name, now they whisper it**

The silence crashes down and hangs there over their heads like a broken chandelier, and Beth lets it hang. It's not important. It still doesn't even feel all that immediate, as if the world Pythia made for her to enter hasn't yet given her up. She might be emerging, slowly, but she's emerging into something that's taking nearly all her attention.

Not Rick or the rest. Not Pythia, standing so close she's almost looming. She has Daryl, who continues to feel like the most fundamentally real thing in the room. Who's still shaking, still drawing ragged, trembling breaths, and who is still bleeding freely from the ugly slash on his dangling arm, the burned raw edges of it blistering and some of the blisters broken open and weeping clear fluid to join the stream of blood as it flows down his wrist and knuckles to pool on the floor.

She's seen him fight, seen him badly wounded. She knows some of how strong he is, how much punishment he can take. But it wouldn't surprise her at all to learn that at least some of the shuddering is pain.

 _Freely given._

Did he know? Did he know what Pythia was going to do to him? He must have. He saw the knife. He offered blood. He gave it without a second's hesitation, knowing the pain he was accepting. For her.

She strokes her fingers through his hair and holds him closer.

"You burned it down," Michonne echoes softly, in a voice that might contain any number of different and conflicting emotions.

Beth simply nods.

"We didn't think she'd come into her power yet." Michonne again, though clearly not speaking to her, and above her Pythia releases a thin laugh.

"Apparently no more did she. She hid that from herself, didn't she? Perhaps because it was too horrible for a young mind to bear. But…" She trails off, and when Beth glances up and focuses on her face, her magnified eyes are narrowed in thought. "No. She was strong enough in mind to remember the Ytend. She remembered the blood. The slaughter. She remembered all the horrible things she saw that night. All except that one."

Carol has kept her place, crouching very near though no longer touching either of them, and when she speaks there's a curious mixture of softness and steel in her tone. "She would have been safer if her powers went back to being dormant. If she forgot she had them at all. Maybe she was protecting herself."

"A moment of rage and pain and terror," Pythia murmurs. Her voice is hoarse, slightly quavery, and when Beth looks more directly at her, it's clear that she's exhausted close to the point of collapse. "That isn't how the Awacan usually happens. But it's not at all unknown. And little witch, this is a much darker world than the one you should have been born into."

In her arms, Daryl shifts, stiffens, braces his hands on her shoulders and gently pushes them apart. His attention catches the bloody handprint he leaves on her jacket, brow furrowing, but she shakes her head, covers his clean hand with hers. Pain is still twisting at his face, but it's clearly less intense, and his shuddering has mostly subsided. She glances down at the slash in his arm - the bleeding is slowing, sluggish, and she thinks she can already make out the edges of new pink skin around the wound.

Even something like this, he's healing astonishingly fast.

Probably not astonishing to him.

He reaches up and touches her chin, eyes questioning, and she closes her fingers around his. Kisses his knuckles.

A conversation in a few seconds, unspoken. She doesn't think about any of it. It just happens. The others are watching and she knows and it couldn't possibly matter any less. Pythia made a world for her to fall into, yes. But there's this world too, the one they made together that first night in her bed and have been building ever since, and now she understands it.

It's already too late to stop this.

"All gods," Pythia whispers. "Is this what I think I'm seeing?"

"Seems that way," Shane says, and it's not especially dry. If it's sardonic, it's only gently so. They don't hate this, she's now certain. They're not angry or disgusted.

They're worried. And Rick is afraid.

"Not consummated?"

Rick clears his throat, nearly a grunt, and shakes his head. Not looking directly at her. Not looking directly at either of them. "No."

"Y'know, I thought so. Way he was with her before." She's silent for a brief moment, and it's not exasperation that drives Beth next but it's not far from it. A healthy dose of weary resignation. Everyone always throws this in as a wrinkle, and in fact it _is,_ and if everyone is airing dirty laundry - or laundry of any kind - she might as well. This couldn't _be_ more awkward.

Hell, maybe Pythia can _help_. If there's helping to be done.

"It's Scyld," she says quietly, and Pythia's gaze snaps to her with an abruptness that's almost audible.

" _What?_ "

"You heard her." Daryl grimaces, bending to grip the hem of his shirt, and he's starting to tear when Beth bats his hand impatiently away and begins to do it for him. _Idiot._ The slash is beginning to scab over, but the scabs are fragile. Easily torn. "Both. At once."

Pythia makes a gulping sound, takes a breath, makes another. Beth feels a rush of chilly satisfaction as she starts to bind up Daryl's arm; about time someone else was wrong-footed by this. About time it wasn't her reeling back, ground suddenly unsteady beneath her.

She knows who she is. Knows what she's done. What she might be able to do. And somehow, kneeling on this bloody floor surrounded by a glimpse of a universe far larger than she could have possibly imagined, she's washed over and filled with a kind of deep, dense peace she hasn't felt in a year. Maybe hasn't ever felt at all.

The journey she started when she first came to Daryl for help, when she first snuck out of her bedroom and hopped that Greyhound to Atlanta… That journey is done. It's ended here.

Now she's standing in the doorway of something new.

"This has never," Pythia mutters, glancing around at the mural, the walls, the metropolis of books beyond. Her small body has slid into a stance run through with tension, as if she's preparing to spring. "Never happened in all of history. Never."

"Yeah," Glenn says, a little tightly. "Yeah, we pretty much know that part."

"So." The sun behind her has dimmed, become not much more than an especially vivid painting, but she turns to face it as if she expects it to do something, her hands clenched at her sides. "More than I thought. Much more. Gods, I didn't…" And her voice cracks. Breaks. Tears, Beth thinks with slight surprise, if she turns there might be tears, but she doesn't turn. She stares up at the raging sun and a strange hush sinks down over them all, and when the lights seem to darken as if in a smoky haze, Beth doubts it's only her imagination. Her hands have paused in the act of knotting up the makeshift bandage, every instinct in her screaming at her to _pay attention._

"He said it was the end," she whispers. "I didn't know. I didn't know what that meant. Rick Grimes." Her voice rises, strengthens, barely sounding like hers anymore. Under Beth's hands, Daryl tenses. "Do you understand what it means that this girl used fire that night?"

"She's got command of her power," Rick says simply, but he doesn't sound certain. "Or she did. She-"

"No, idiot boy. This _girl,_ this little witch, she killed a pack of Ytend of a number that would have pleased a whole cyne. She did it alone. She did it at her first flush, without training. She should have struggled to make a marble levitate. Instead she fought like an Ides of three full decades. More."

Pythia turns. Not merely slow but mechanical, as if she's being guided - controlled, even - by a force outside herself. An unseen hand. In a place like this, Beth muses, hands loose on her knees, there might be a good many unseen hands, and any of them might act with any number of purposes.

"You thought the Ytend were after her because she's the last. Simply because a job undone is a job that's likely to bite you in the ass, given long enough. No." She shakes her head, eyes enormous behind her glasses. "Possibly it was that at first. But then they saw what she could do. They hunt her now not because she's the last." She takes a breath and her eyes slip closed, and she appears to be settling into something. Nodding almost imperceptibly, as if accepting.

Accepting something painful.

"They hunt her because if this is what she can do as a girl not even twenty, they can only imagine what she might do as a Drya of full age. They hunt her, Grimes, because she terrifies them."

And the walls scream.

It sounds like the walls. Then it sounds like everywhere. It sounds like it's bleeding out of the fucking _air,_ as if atoms themselves can shriek like crazed banshees - because it's not just one voice but hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands in perfect unison. It's gratingly sharp like a serrated blade, slicing across her eardrums and into her skull, and she slaps her hands over her ears and ducks her head, clenching her jaw, vaguely aware of everyone around her doing the same. Rick and the others standing back, weapons forgotten, and Carol beside her, and Daryl, features twisted in agony.

Except Pythia. She's standing, looking past them at the door through which they all came, and somehow Beth finds enough strength to focus on her - enough to see, with a fresh clarity, that tears are indeed glistening in her eyes. Welling, though she hasn't yet allowed them to overflow.

The scream cuts off as suddenly as it came, so sudden it almost hurts in itself, and Beth falls forward, catching herself on her hands, heaving air. She hadn't been breathing. She couldn't. How the hell can anyone breathe in the midst of a noise that feels like it can literally tear you apart?

That scream. She knows it.

 _Oh, fuck._

"They're coming," Pythia says, very soft. Her voice cuts through everything with all the ruthless edge the scream possessed. " _He_ knows. He felt it. Felt you open that part of you. Release what's inside. Now his eye is turned, and they're coming for you." She looks around at all of them, her magnified tears shining like liquid glass. "All of you. More than you can fight and win."

"You have defenses, don't you? This place has stood for thousands of years, hasn't it? No fucking _way_ they should be able to get in here." But Michonne's sword is unsheathed, blade flashing in the dreamy lantern light, and as Daryl closes a firm hand around Beth's wrist and pulls her lightly to her feet, she sees the others drawing their weapons, the sheen of blades, Rick's enormous gun nearly glowing in his grip.

"I have defenses. Not strong enough for this." Pythia shakes her head, and now her tears are flowing, and the light catches them and makes them sparkle as she removes her glasses and tosses them aside. She's beautiful, Beth sees all at once. Inhumanly so. Some kind of mask has fallen away and now here's a woman who could command wars be fought in her name. "They'll slow them. Not stop them. Your enemy commands armies, Rick. Armies innumerable. He'll send them all after you if he thinks he has to."

"Who? Who's our _enemy?_ "

She shakes her head again. "No time. If you run, you might get out. Run now. I can hold them off long enough to give you a chance." Literally out of thin air a sword appears in her hand - long and broad and razor-edges. And more than Rick's gun, glowing. No trick of the light or the eyes. Blue fire ripples up and down its edge, and Pythia gives them all a grim smile.

Grim - but somehow satisfied.

"Make for the main gate, Rick. That's the strongest point. They'll have left it mostly alone." She moves swiftly to the center of the chamber, raises her sword and thrusts it down into the floor. White lightning cracks outward, spidering under their feet and through the walls, and from outside comes the awful noise of what might be a hundred towers groaning and ready to topple.

The others are heading for the door and the bridge beyond, but there's a kind of disorganization in it, bewilderment, and Beth sees it with a dreadful twisting in her gut as she follows, Daryl beside her with his bow in his hands. She hasn't seen them fight, not exactly, but she's seen enough to have discerned that they're effective at all because they can act as a single unit, smoothly coordinated. There's nothing smooth about this.

If they can't get their shit together, their chances of getting out alive drop. Perhaps by a lot. She doesn't have to know much to be certain of that.

Glenn turns without pausing, looking nearly frantic. "How the fuck are we supposed to _find_ the gate?

"Find the path, Pathfinder," Pythia cries over a fresh chorus of shrieks. "This place will help you. It's still mine. Mine for a little while longer."

Beth glances back once more before her feet hit the bridge - Daryl close at her heels - and sees Pythia lower the sword again. This time, instead of lightning, what ripples outward is a seething wave of flame. It spares them and the bridge. But nothing else.

Acrid smoke bites into her nostrils and her eyes sting.

 _It's always fire. Always fucking fire._

"Run, little witch!" Faint now over the pounding of their feet on the swinging bridge, and Beth can't spare terror for the long fall down. Already fire is beginning to lick up the walls of the towers. "For the sake of all your mothers! For the sake of the seed inside you!"

 _Fuck the seed_. Whatever the fuck that even means.

She barely notices when they hit a floor that isn't swinging and start off in a direction that seems and might very well _be_ entirely random, Glenn at point. The fire isn't yet surrounding them but it doesn't take keen perception to establish that it will be, and very soon. They're heading generally downward, hurtling along galleries and down the odd stairway at such a speed she can't believe she isn't tripping over her own goddamn feet, but something is carrying her - something other than those weirdly nimble feet - and she isn't in a position to second guess.

Clouds of smoke. Heat, so intense that her back is pouring sweat. And above them, dim and vaguely humanoid shapes leaping and scrambling.

A lot of them.

A howl from behind and a hot wave of air slams into her back, Daryl's hands tight on her shoulders, and she stumbles, almost falls before he rights her. "Don't look back," he hisses in her ear. "Run. Fuckin' _run._ "

Down and down, and the smoke is like needles stabbing into her eyes, tears nearly blinding her. She gropes in front of her and feels a back, an arm - possibly Carol's, but could be anyone's. And all at once a cry from Glenn cuts through the shrieks and the roar-crackle of the fire, and they're tearing across level ground, burning wood and fluttering paper and ash raining all around them.

All those books. Just for a second it hits her and it closes her heart in an aching fist. All those books. Hundreds of thousands of them. Millions. Everything in them. Everything they said it was: the knowledge of thousands of worlds. Burning. She barely had time to get her head around the idea of its _existence_ , and now it's all gone. Or it will be.

They can't save it.

And Pythia herself set the fire, to save them.

"Fuck!" Shane, and dimly ahead she sees Glenn slowing, turning - raising his knife. "Here they come."

All around them, those crawling shapes closing in, hisses and snarls and horrible laughter, the clicking of long jagged teeth and claws on stone. She half turns, her own knife in her hand, the fist around her heart risen into her throat. Daryl's bow is once more in his hands, raised, and as one of the things launches itself at him it halts in midair and drops like a sack of bones, a bolt through its skull.

"We can't stop to fight 'em!" The sound of Rick's gun is like thunder, and when she whirls again she sees him stumbling back, shaking his head. "There's too many! Push through!"

 _Where the fuck are we even GOING?_ It's possible that she screams it. She doesn't know and it doesn't matter; a coiled naked thing uncoils and hits her in the chest like a kick, reeling her back and filling her nose with the stench of an infected wound. A cry of her name behind her - Daryl - but the entire burning world has narrowed to the point of her knife and she stabs at its shoulders, stabs over and over toward herself, upward at where she thinks the base of its skull must be. A _punching_ sensation through her hand and up to her elbow, and as she yanks the knife free the Ytend tumbles to her feet with its sore-riddled skin scalded and hissing, dark blood black in the light of the fire.

A hand closes big and iron-gripped around her wrist and she's hauled forward, boots skidding, screaming and brandishing the knife before she realizes that it's Daryl and they're running again. The space around them feels vast, endlessly wide and above them only the disintegrating towers and the creatures swarming down the walls.

A fucking army.

Rick's gun again. Again. Ahead and to the side, Michonne's sword flashes crimson and gold and three Ytend crumple, severed heads rolling away like basketballs into the flickering shadows. She remembers this, and with every thud of her boots it's clearer. She remembers the heat, the blood, and she remembers the screams - theirs and hers. The last time she sang, maybe. She sang as she killed them, force-fed them the fire in her hands, and now she remembers that a sick part of her actually _liked_ it, doing that, killing utterly without effort. Liked it and wanted more.

Until she ran. And forgot everything.

This isn't the same. Only it is.

They swing wide to the right, and as she chances a glance up she realizes that the space through which they're running is simply the open floor at the base of the towers - no other corridors, no hallways, and only those immense structures in their way. How Glenn can make out _any_ kind of pathway, even with his clearly preternatural senses, is literally incredible - and the shrieks are hammering off the walls of her skull, grating laughter, insane mockery. Almost words.

 _Run, little bitch. Run like you did then. Couldn't save them. All you did was kill, and that sure as fuck helped, didn't it? You didn't save anyone, you spilled more blood, and it's going to end that way._

 _The people you love will die. And you'll kill._

The silver is ice in her palm.

She glances back once more, and only once, because what she sees isn't something she wants to see ever again: the floor and walls and the _air_ seething with crawling grinning horrors, pouring out of the smoke and fire, many of them _on_ fire, dancing and laughing in flames as their skin blackens and cracks and weeps steaming blood. Hundreds. Maybe more. Hundreds, and closing. She can't measure distance at fucking _all_ right now, but it might only be yards.

And that's when the ground begins to tremble.

Her pace stutters. All of them do; she feels rather than sees it, the world jittering before her eyes. She drags in a scorching breath and raises her head.

The towers are falling.

Massive chunks of burning wood and hails of books like incendiary bombs. To her left, at what has to be a fair distance, she sees one piece twice the size of a grand piano crash to the the floor. In a daze she watches it bloom fire, hideously beautiful, before the shockwave hits her and almost knocks her off her feet. More behind her, another slap of air that kicks her lungs empty and has her staggering-

She sees the one in front of her a full twenty seconds before it hits, and those twenty seconds save her life.

Everyone lunges sideways, Daryl seizing her shoulder and practically _hurling_ her, and as she goes sprawling and her cheek smacks into the stone she can smell her own singed hair. She blinks her vision clear and sees an oncoming tidal wave of bulbous eyes and lolling tongues, teeth streaked with old blood, and she tastes copper and Rick is shouting.

She perceives all of these things with a strange detachment. She won't have time to lose anyone else. Won't have time to do any more killing. She's about to die. The fire in her hands is no good to her here, completely _immersed_ in fire. The power she supposedly has, that allegedly terrifies the monsters now tearing toward her, is as worthless as she is. So much for witches.

So much for seeds.

 _Change! We're not fast enough like this!_

Roars so close that aren't fire and aren't Ytend. She's dimly puzzled, turning her throbbing head to see what they are and attempting to push herself up, and an enormous hand - a _paw_ \- shoves beneath her middle and tosses her upward and backward, and she doesn't think. Memory captures her muscles and she grabs. Grips.

Sinks her fingers into thick, soft fur.

One of her hands is curled around a wide leather strap, and she knows: Daryl, Daryl in fierd, his bow changed to fit him and slung beneath him as he carries her, as he puts his head down and gallops after the others through the rain of fire. She manages to lift her head and sees them ahead, black and brown and silver backs - she's riding a wolf with a pack of wolves, and an utterly crazy part of her laughs at it, at the whole thing, thrills to it and grins as wide as the chasing Ytend.

A leaping blur to her right, and she turns, sends the blade down in a smooth slash, and watches with that same dark thrill as the thing falls twitching and bleeding to the floor.

Gone in a second as its friends trample it.

She stays up, braces herself half raised with one hand clutched tight around the bow's strap and the other clutching the knife. She doesn't have to just _hang on_ back here. She doesn't have to just let herself be carried and hope for the best.

She's in a place where she can get shit _done._

And that wasn't the last one to fling itself at her. At _her_ \- she doesn't think it's only her imagination, that she's a target. All of them, sure - she's aware in at least a peripheral way that the rest of the cyne is cuffing and clawing plenty of spindly bodies aside - but she's different. What she catches on their hideous faces, in the shattered mirror fragments that constitute her vision. Mindless hatred, hunger, an infernal kind of glee - and yes. Yes, something that might possibly be fear.

Might be.

She holds the strap and swings her entire body down and to the side, and as Daryl skids and scrambles and makes a hard left, she slashes through four of them at once as they lunge up with teeth bared. Not deep cuts, but in another of those shards of focus she sees the burn of the silver bubbling around and in the wounds, and they writhe, clawing bloody scores in themselves.

Daryl skids again, halts, and she barely has time to tighten her hold before he rears like a horse, snarling, and sends two more flying with a swinging blow from his paw, scythe-claws curled. Light swells above her; she looks up and has time to beat at his flank, crying _Go_ before another huge chunk of tower slams into the floor - where they had been. A searing slap of wind against her back, and while she can't feel much pain now…

Christ, who knows how badly she's been burned.

Later. If she lives. Ahead of them something is rising, something high and wide and bright, flickering in a way that makes her certain it's only more fire. But a few more seconds and she knows it's not - it's a massive doorway, easily a hundred feet high, and while she can't make it out with any clarity through the smoke and the flame and the watery stinging in her eyes, she does see that it's gilded, ornate, and likely beautiful beyond words. She can almost grasp it in her gut, her marrow - the way she would ache if she could see it the way it was meant to be seen, the awe she's meant to be feeling.

And it's melting. Raining liquid gold onto the floor in a steady shower, and beyond it is only darkness.

 _The gate._

A voice rises again above the hurricane of noise, and though it's deeper and rougher she recognizes it instantly as Rick's.

"Racian! Beorgan eower dreor!"

Easy enough to get the gist. _Run, motherfuckers._

They do. She's not fighting anymore; Daryl is running too fast for that, running hard enough that she half believes the sheer physics involved will rip her off his back and fling her into the eager claws and teeth of the Ytend. She flattens herself against him and buries her face in his fur, screws her eyes shut-

And everything stops.

The running doesn't. Daryl's paws are still pounding the ground, and she can hear the thumping gait and ragged panting of the others. But they've slowed just a touch, and the screams of the Ytend and roar of the fire are gone. Not fainter; _gone,_ as if they've abruptly fallen into an entirely different world.

Hell, they probably _have._

Cautiously, she raises her head, and she raises it into utter blackness.

She blinks. Closes one eye, the other, both. Squeezes them and opens them again. No difference. If anything, with her eyes open everything is darker.

She lifts a hand, waves it briefly in front of her face. Nothing but the slight displacement of air, palpable even with the breeze of speed. No echo of the cyne's passage. No sense of enclosure. They might be running through an endless nothingness, and she wonders with an odd numbness whether even Glenn would be able to find his way through it.

If there _is_ a way through.

Daryl is slowing to a trot, the sound of the others' pace changing accordingly. Beth manages to push herself up further, almost sitting, blinking into the darkness with her knife still clutched in her hand. Everything smells like smoke, ashes, the stench of burning flesh and hair, but all that continues to seem inconsequential. It has nothing to do with the present and its contents. She'll worry about it later, if she worries at all.

She tightens her hands in Daryl's fur, and she feels an answering rumble vibrating up through his chest to his back. _I'm here. I'm all right._

Rick again, uncomfortably quiet in the utter silence, as if the silence itself is eating his sound. And tense. Hoarse. "Asc hwa meant scieppan glam?"

A grunt and a growl that she takes for frustration. Glenn. "Beon genethan."

"Daryl?"

"Ne." Another rumble from him and all through her, working deep. Deeper than a simple noise like that should be capable of. She releases a heavy breath as low heat chases the vibration, and internally she rolls her eyes.

Even _here_ she can't turn it off.

But it's not that kind of heat.

It _is,_ it absolutely is - racing through her blood and settling, humming like a memory of his voice between her legs. But it's not stopping there. It's racing upward again, burning hotter as it goes, out and into the marrow of her right arm. The tingle of a waking limb begins there and she feels it fizzing like carbonation up toward the surface of her skin. She has to move it, she has to _move_ it or it'll drive her fucking crazy, and she lifts it, knife handle curving in her palm, holds it high-

The light is so abrupt and so bright a little cry bursts out of her, and once more she squeezes her eyes shut. But through her lids she can see that it's still there.

There at the tip of her blade.

Daryl has stopped dead. She knows they all have. She can feel five wolf gazes on her like five heavy paws, and she shakes her head like she can deny the whole thing and it'll go away. But of course it won't. Of course this is really happening, and of course she has no choice.

" _Bealu,_ " Michonne whispers, and Shane breathes what sounds like a guttural curse. For another long moment, no one moves. No one speaks. She doesn't. They don't. She sits there on Daryl's back and holds the light aloft, and wonders if there might come a point at which this shit is actually under her control.

Though regardless, this is useful. Possibly.

She opens her eyes just as Glenn clears his throat and turns, ears pricked. He's gone bipedal - they all have except for Daryl - and he takes a few steps forward, raising his snout and scenting the air. For some reason her attention lands on Rick's gun, grown almost comically large to match his altered shape. Not a handgun anymore. Practically a shotgun, in human hands.

Even with teeth and claws and _size_ like he has, he still carries - and presumably uses - a gun.

Again it strikes her: these are not humans, no. But they also aren't even remotely bestial.

Glenn glances back at them - at _her,_ her light catching his eyes and flashing their gold mirrors, and she notices that the light itself doesn't actually appear to be doing much. There's a circle of illumination all around them, but it fades quickly into the blackness and nothing beyond it is visible. Only the ground beneath them - a gray, flat, featureless thing that might be stone and also might not be.

But Glenn's wolf mouth is stretched into something she knows is a smile. He lifts a paw, curls his thick claw-tipped fingers in a beckoning gesture. "Ic agan. Cuman."

He turns and begins to walk again - still upright - and after a second or two Rick catches her eye and beckons as well, jerking his big, narrow head in Glenn's direction. It's not difficult to interpret.

 _Go with him._

Daryl carries her forward on all fours, gait now smooth and easy, and as she keeps the light high she hears the soft shuffle of the rest as they follow. Following _her,_ the magic she apparently truly can do - and she doesn't know if this is worth being terrified of, and regardless of what she does or doesn't remember the idea of the Ytend being _terrified_ by her is a lot to swallow, but that she's helping to lead them, that she's _doing_ something…

That's not such an awful feeling.

Once again she tightens her fingers in Daryl's fur, draws a long breath-

And Glenn opens the door, and they all step out onto an empty sidewalk, cracked and gum-spotted and dimly lit by a flickering streetlight, on a chilly Atlanta night.

* * *

 **Notes:**

"Racian! Beorgan eower dreor!" - "Run! To save your blood!" (essentially "Run for your lives!" "Asc hwa meant scieppan glam?" - "Can anyone make a light?" "Beon genethan." - "I'm trying."


	32. it wraps me in its blinding twilight

**Chapter 32: it wraps me in its blinding twilight**

She grips the dense, soft fur of Daryl's back and stares. At all of it. At everything. At the trash-lined street, at the small band of kids yelling and whooping at the far end near a crooked stoplight and a stretch of wasteland, at the garish glow of the check cashing place and the discount furniture store directly opposite them, at the junker car that rumbles by, at the elderly woman exiting the check cashing place and pausing to root through her purse. At the badly patched cracks in the pavement. At the sickly yellow flickering streetlights. At the weeds.

She doesn't recognize this specific block. But really, it could be any shitty part of Atlanta or its outskirts.

She glances to her right and there, over a shadowy brick building that might once have been a garage, rise the glittering towers of the downtown skyline.

" _Fuck,_ " Glenn breathes from beside her, and she jumps and whirls, holding tighter to Daryl's fur. He hasn't changed, hasn't even risen from all fours, but Glenn has, and as she glances back she sees the others standing and looking around with all the confusion she's feeling, human once more.

"Beth," Rick says, low. "No one is gonna be able to see him like that. Or you. But you should probably get down anyway."

She blinks, pulls in a shaky breath. The world is swimming back into sharper focus, though it still feels so much like a fantastically vivid dream. The warm, powerful solidity of Daryl beneath her, the cool air washing across her burned skin - her face and arms at least, she's beginning to feel, though so far it doesn't seem much worse than a bad sunburn. The sting lingering in her eyes. The stench of the fire clinging to her.

All real.

She sheathes her knife and then, on impulse, she lowers herself and wraps her arms around Daryl's strong neck and squeezes. It's an awkward hug, and something about it feels distinctly childish, but he rumbles a quiet sound that's hard to mistake for anything but happy - wearily so - and bends at the knees and elbows so she has an easier dismount.

 _Dismount_. She thinks the word with slightly hysterical amusement.

She stands, scrubs a hand roughly over her watering eyes. She's wobbling more than she would like, her knees feeling like they're full of water and her muscles rubbery. Her arms hurt. Everything hurts. The back of her throat is a long-drained lakebed. And her stomach is whimpering that if she doesn't put something in it _now,_ it's going to start metabolizing her other organs.

Soft cracking behind her, and the almost imperceptible rush of air filling spaces he no longer occupies. She doesn't turn, and the heavy and now comforting weight of his hand settles over her shoulder.

"Y'alright?"

"Do I still have hair?"

"All of it. Mostly. Got some frizzy at the ends." She feels a light tug on her ponytail - what little of her hair remains bound into it - and she battles down the urge to collapse backward and trust him to catch her, curl up in his arms and sleep for the next week.

"Alright." Rick is scanning them all, swiping a hand down his face. He looks about as flushed as Beth feels, his hands and significant parts of his face smeared with ash and soot. "Anyone hurt?"

Carol glances up at him; she's bending over Michonne's shoulder, peeling back a bloody, torn strip of cloth. Michonne grimaces, jaw tight. "It's not too bad."

Rick sighs, and it's difficult to read everything it contains. There are layers upon layers. "Anyone else?"

"Think we all got seared pretty good," Shane says - nearly growls. "Otherwise-"

"Daryl." Beth turns sharply and gropes for his arm before he can put her off, seizing it and tugging it into the dim light and mostly ignoring his wincing grumble. It's still ugly, still blistered and raw and crusted with blood, but the bleeding itself has stopped, and the thin band of new skin is the tiniest bit thicker.

"It's fine," he mutters.

Carol moves swiftly toward them, pushes Beth gently aside and grasps his wrist, peering close. "It's not fine. It will be. Clean it and bandage it up good and you shouldn't have any trouble with it." She looks up at him. "You have goldenrod at the frithus? Calendula?"

"And comfrey." He nods, and shoots a glare at her, though there's no heat in it. "I ain't an idiot."

"That's debatable." She carefully releases him, and as Beth steps further back she frames his face and pulls him close, nuzzling at his cheek. "You were brave back there," she murmurs - so low Beth almost fails to catch it. "Ormate eorlscipe, besorg byre."

He ducks his head and says nothing, and when Carol steps back and presses a kiss to his forehead, Beth has no idea how, if she were called upon to do so, she would ever articulate what she sees on his face. Not shame. Not embarrassment. Not pride. Not relief, or sadness, or happiness or love. Something between them all and combining them all and nothing like any of them.

She doesn't need to name it to know that it's beautiful.

The others are coming now, gathering in, and as she steps further back she knows what's coming this time: that strange and completely inhuman physical communion, the nosing and nuzzling and hands stroking across cheeks and through hair. No more tension. No more fear, or whatever pain any of them are feeling. It's simply gone, as if it's been crowded out. There's no room for it, in this kind of closeness.

She looks away and shuts her eyes.

Its ending is palpable, and she opens them to see everyone stepping away, slipping out of whatever aura that informal ritual generates. She can see how tired they are, all of them, wound around every muscle. Tired and clearly in just as much pain as she is, if not more.

"So." Shane rolls a shoulder, winces. "The hell do we do now?"

Rick shakes his head, slow and weary. It's more than weariness, in fact, and Beth can feel its weight with a kind of immediacy that perhaps shouldn't be possible. What they saw, what they were told, the truth about _her_ …

And the library. That loss.

"I dunno. And I dunno if we're in a position to figure it out this second. We're exhausted. All of us. And maybe we're alright, but we still have wounds need treating."

Shane frowns, impatience twisting his mouth. "We're also being _hunted._ You heard the lady. We don't have any goddamn idea who this _he_ is. And-" He tosses a glance in Daryl's direction, and it's not exactly affectionate. "-there was the thing about our _lone mountain wo-_ "

" _SALNES._ "

Rick doesn't roar the word - not quite - but it comes out with all the force of a roar, and Shane literally stumbles back, blinking in obvious surprise. All of them are blinking, wide-eyed, startled. Just as the intimacy between all of them had been palpable, what's replaced it is palpable as well, and the air practically crackles with tension. Beth's forearms ache with sudden gooseflesh, her breath locked into the base of her throat.

But she doesn't move.

"We'll deal with that," Rick says quietly. "We'll deal with everything. But while we're here, you know they can't come after us in those kinds of numbers. Not unless we're a whole lot more fucked that we thought."

"Lotta things been going the way we didn't expect, Rick." Michonne shifts her stance, but it's solid as ever, despite her pain. "Just saying."

"Yeah. But this, I think we'd know. We'd feel it this second, standin' here." Rick looks around at all of them, and Beth can see it with bizarre clarity: him out of view of the cyne, out of view of anyone, collapsing onto the first soft surface that'll take him. He's so close to it even now. "Go home, all of you. Eat. Rest up. Tend to yourselves. We meet at the warehouse tomorrow at eleven, and then we'll see what we see." He pauses, takes a breath. "And check your wards. Refresh your sigils. All of 'em. Maybe make some new ones. Just 'cause I don't think we're in danger of an imminent repeat of what happened back there, doesn't mean I think this is the time to get stupid."

Nods. Murmurs - not all of them pleased, but apparently no one else willing to offer argument. One by one they seem to move backward, sinking into patches of shadow with eerie completeness, the sounds of their bodies breaking and reforming, and she catches glimpses of enormous dogs trotting away into the night. Until it's only Rick, and Daryl - and her.

Rick faces them squarely, looks them over. Studies Daryl with particular intensity, those steel blue eyes shining even in the streetlight's unreliable glow. "That was a deep cut. And silver. You sure you're alright?"

Beside her, Daryl grunts affirmation and nods. Rick returns the nod and turns to her. "We have to figure out what you're doin'."

"I'm-" All at once the sheer reality of _time_ slams into her, the fact that it was daylight when they entered the club and it's full dark now, and it's utterly impossible to say with any certainty how long they were gone. No day in those worlds. No real night. Only different hues of dusk, the light in a constant state of transition. And even enough dark to show stars… That's not _her_ dark. Those aren't _her_ stars.

Except maybe they are.

"What the fuck _day_ is it?" She fumbles in her jacket for her phone - her _phone,_ like she had completely forgotten it was there, though ten to one it would have been essentially a paperweight - and moans softly when she pulls it out and holds it up. Its screen is completely shattered, a corner of it warped as if the heat partially melted it. The home button does nothing, and she doesn't think it's a battery issue.

So much for Candy Crush.

"It's night of the day we left," Rick says - gently. "We've only been gone a few hours. Far as this world is concerned."

"Shit." She stares down at her phone for a few seconds more, than grits her teeth and winds up, sends it sailing through the air and a good way down the street to crash to the pavement.

During her very brief career playing softball in school - beginning the year her life ended - she was known for her arm.

"I think I have work tomorrow." Which might, in context, be one of the more ridiculous things she's ever said.

"Where do you work?"

"Gas station." She rakes her tangled, filthy hair back from her filthy face and squeezes her eyes shut. She feels absolutely horrible, though not significantly worse than she did. But now she has to replace the thing. And _Candy Crush_. "Pretty sure I have an afternoon shift. I need to get home."

Rick looks at Daryl, eyes narrowed. "Is she warded?"

"Some." Daryl rolls a distinctly uncomfortable shoulder, casting her a doubtful glance. "Work too. But ain't been refreshed in a bit. I dunno-"

"Check 'em. But not now. Do it in the day." Rick swings his gaze back to her, and now there's something in it she doesn't totally understand. A new kind of keenness - and not a happy one. He's considering, and whatever it is has him uneasy. "You should stay with him, least for tonight. Safest place in the city, probably. And-" His steely eyes flick to Daryl, and his voice is softer. "You'd be with her anyway."

"Yeah," Daryl murmurs. "I would."

"Yeah." Rick rolls his neck; it cracks about twenty times and he sucks in a sharp hiss. "Alright. Get outta here." He turns and starts to walk into the shadows.

"Rick."

He pauses, glances back, and Beth looks up at Daryl as an unseen hand clenches in her gut. He's stricken, something horribly close to misery wrenching at his mouth, a ghost of _fear,_ and she gropes for him and threads their fingers together, holding tight. She doesn't even know what it'll do, to touch him that way; she only knows that if he looks like that, she has to be _with_ him. To do whatever she can.

As deep an instinct as she's ever felt.

He's not the only one being changed.

Rick is silent, waiting, eyes hooded. Daryl releases a trembling breath, another, and rips the words out of himself.

" _Hot on the trail of your lone mountain wolf._ "

Rick shakes his head. "Don't."

"But-"

"I said don't." Hard. But no anger. Not this time. "Whatever this is, it's not your fault. You hear me? It's not."

"You don't know that," Daryl whispers. His grip is like a vise, nearly painful, but she bites it back. She's an anchor. She's his ground. She's happy to be that for him, more than she ever would have imagined.

"Yeah, I do." He gestures off into the sallow night, down the street and into the denser city beyond, darker in its way than any Scead she's been in. "Go."

Daryl doesn't move. Rick does, sliding backward into that darkness, turning again. But not quite. He pauses one final time and fixes Beth with that hard gunslinger gaze - and with all that softness beneath. It's always there, she thinks. It's foundational in him, underpinning everything else. Even if he has to cover it over most of the time.

He's letting her see it now.

"Take care of him, Beth."

He's gone like smoke.

They stand there for a long moment, hand in hand, the sounds of Atlanta at night seething all around them. Crickets and cat horns, metallic crashes and slams, cries, yells, sirens, the sound of glass breaking, the thud of stereo bass. Yet somehow it's quiet, too, as if together they've built a barrier between them and it. Their own personal veil, and this is a world where even now no one might be able to see them.

This isn't the vestiges of that other universe clinging to her. This is simply how life is now. Wondrous and horrifying and indescribably strange.

"We should get back," Daryl breathes.

She looks up at him again. His features have smoothed out, at least on the surface, but beneath it he's still churning with all the things she saw. And she knows that at least for now, there probably isn't anything she can do. Asking about it might be the worst of her options. If she waits, if he rests, maybe later.

But something strikes her. "What about your bike?"

"It's a ways from here. I'll get it in the day. We should go straight back now." He glances around, scanning with bright eyes, and she catches the flare in his nostrils as he scents the air. "Probably we're okay, but…"

"So how do we get to your…" _Den_. Should she call it that? Has she? Might that somehow be insulting, the way she's gathered other things are, that she wouldn't have expected to be so? "Your place?"

"Frithus?"

"Isn't that what Carol called it?" She's heard Shane use another word, though. She's almost certain. _Geata_

"Means sanctuary. Safe haven." He sighs. "Let's hope it fuckin' is."

She's about to ask him again, when abruptly he pulls his hand free from hers and steps back, swinging his bow to lie against his chest, shaking himself and hunching his shoulders as he starts to change. She watches him, and as usual it's a little difficult to breathe. Because he might be tired and he might be in a not inconsiderable amount of pain, but it's obvious that he's doing it with the thought of pleasing her in mind - no rush, and a kind of alien sensuousness in how he arches his reforming limbs and spine. A snake shedding its skin looks nothing like this, she knows, but as she stares at him with her lip caught between her teeth, she thinks this _looks_ like that process must _feel._

Becoming new. And _yourself._

And he's crouched in front of her, huge and glossy, eyes glittering as he blinks slowly at her. He lifts a paw and holds it out, and she knows what he's offering. She goes to him, buries her hands in his fur and climbs onto his back - where, in another point of fantastic strangeness, she's beginning to feel so at home.

She could push herself up - not completely upright, but enough to look ahead. But she doesn't need to. Doesn't want to. She knows where they're going; how they get there doesn't matter. She lays her head between his shoulderblades and lets her eyes fall closed as he sinks into the shadows, moving swift and quiet and smooth.

She's exhausted and she hurts everywhere, _inside_ where everything is all screams and flames and blood, and the grief that's kept its place like a lead ball at the bottom of her mind isn't gone. She understands now that it never will be. And it doesn't matter, because she feels absolutely safe like this, absolutely protected, and he's so soft. So warm. His heart is a steady bass drum in her ear, the sound of his breathing like rolling surf. She could fall asleep like this.

She does.


	33. kiss me now so we can feel alive

**Chapter 33: kiss me now so we can feel alive**

When he brought her back from the farm, wounded and semi-delirious and strapped to his bike, he carried her up to his den. She remembered it later in sickening rolls and swells, like a stormy ocean. Unpleasant, even if she felt safe in his arms.

Now he's carrying her again, holding her against his chest as he climbs the stairs, and there's nothing sickening about it; she circles her arms loosely around his powerful neck and tips her head against his furry shoulder, and doesn't open her eyes. She doesn't have to. She's safe, like she was then, and he's strong and warm and it's good to be with him. And yes, she's only very tired, and he could have shaken her fully awake when she slipped off his back, but instead he scooped her up like he did before, like he's done more than once, and cradled her.

It's not like he thinks she can't do for herself. It's not that he thinks she's weak. He doesn't think that at all. It merely pleases him to feel like he can care for her.

She won't deny him that. Not now.

Up the stairs and down the long hallway, and then he's shouldering the door open and stooping to enter, crossing the small, dim room and crouching to lay her on his bedroll before he turns away to light candles. She remembers his bed as much thicker and more comfortable than it had looked, and it is, and she curls a little, yawns, turns her head and blinks sleepily up at him as he comes back. Looming so dark over her, all long teeth and dense muscle, but though the dish of flickering candles is behind him, by some trick of that light she can see his eyes, and they aren't mirrored. They're that clear pale blue, and gentle, and he extends a paw and lifts her hair away from her face with the tip of one careful claw.

 _Beautiful monster_.

"'m so goddamn tired," she murmurs - stating the obvious, but at her level of exhaustion stating the obvious seems perfectly reasonable. She's also not surprised to see him shake his head.

"Scolde abrucan." He pauses, glances over his shoulder at something he can't see. "Bathian." He leans down and presses his muzzle close to her, snuffling at her hair with a cool wet nose, and she breathes a laugh and bats at him. Just catches a smile pulling at his mouth.

No human face. But discernible human expressions, and she knows she's not imposing them on him.

"Thu stencan, magden."

The word - and the one before it - sounds enough like English that she thinks she can probably guess what he means with a reasonable degree of certainty. She bats at him again but when her fingers make contact she curls her hands around his muzzle and holds him, leaning up to kiss the end of his nose. "I'm not the only one."

He hesitates for half a moment, that smile lingering, before he pulls out of her grasp and huffs, playing at offense. She's pushing herself up, swiping a hand down her face and muffling another yawn and preparing to ask him what he intends to do about it, when he edges back a bit further and - to her mild disappointment - begins to change, arching and grimacing slightly as his skin warps and his bones crack back into place.

He's wonderful like this, she muses sleepily. But the Wolf is so wonderful too.

"I'll get some water," he says, quiet, and nods at a pack down by the foot of the bedroll. "There's some energy bars in there. Think probably some jerky. I know it ain't much, but-"

"No, that's fuckin' _perfect_." She practically lunges for them, abruptly and completely awake as her empty gut whines at her. Sleep, yes, but she's already had a nap of sorts and now she's hungrier than she can remember being since… Since ever, maybe, and when she unzips the pack and locates what feels like a Slim Jim she almost bites into the plastic. She glances up, chewing, to see him watching her with open amusement as he drops into a crouch, a large steel basin of water in his hands.

"You wanna take a sec and breathe there?"

She raises an amiable middle finger, stripping off the rest of the plastic. It's both far too salty and very bland, and in truth she could have eaten it with the wrapper on and probably not noticed a difference. It might be the best thing she's ever tasted. "How the hell long were we _really_ gone, anyway?"

He rolls a shoulder, unfolding a towel from a small pile of linens by the wall. "Time don't work there. If you had a watch or whatever, hands'd be spinnin' in circles."

"Okay, but can you _guess?_ "

He pauses and looks at her, the amusement now tinged with what can only be affectionate exasperation. "More than an hour, less than a week."

"Fuck you." She dives back into the pack and emerges with a Power Bar. There's something about this, she thinks as she watches Daryl spreading out the towel, shadows leaping on the wall in the candlelight, that's so weird it swings everything back around to normal. It's weird as _weird_ existed before muses and oracles and towers, a less intense kind of weird that has no dire consequences and isn't likely to result in anyone getting hurt or killed, or the end of the universe. The burning library seems like a dream. The mural, the swarming Ytend, the crimson figure on the balcony, her own magic - none of those memories carry the weight of reality with them.

This - warm and safe in a werewolf's den, eating a peanut butter Power Bar and watching said werewolf prepare what she guesses is a bath - is real. This is the _world_.

She can live here.

He leans over to a small folded canvas bag by the linens and turns with a washcloth and a bar of soap, holds out a hand, and she gets it - she's pretty sure - and something else warm ripples through her, long and sweet and aching a little as it travels south.

It's not as if he hasn't seen her naked plenty of times by now. But there's something about this, about what's since become clear between them, and now that thing is sitting there and looking expectantly from one to the other, daring them to go at it head-on with their eyes fixed forward.

It's not an uncomfortable feeling. Not exactly. But it's there.

No way is she saying no. She returns the pack to the foot of the bedroll and takes a breath, fingers working distractedly at the hem of her shirt. There are some things regarding the mechanics of this that she could ask about, some things regarding _everything_ they could be doing and saying when they remain motionless and silent, but instead she inclines her head toward the basin, lips curling in what feels like a slightly awkward smile.

"How cold is that?"

He gives her his own smile, so faint. "You don't trust me?" He murmurs something inaudible and lifts a hand and sets it over the water, fingers spread, and as she tugs her shirt slowly up past her ribs, the water begins to simmer gently. To steam. The vapor drifts into the air and over his face, softening the light all around him and making him look ethereal. Ghost-like, with his shining eyes and his shadows, in a way that isn't discomfiting. Not at all.

 _Beautiful_.

"I trust you," she whispers.

He turns back to her, and she shivers and doesn't stop, and he makes no attempt to hide how closely he's watching her as she pulls her shirt off over her head and lets it fall.

He was perfectly correct; she does stink. Of sweat and smoke, but also of fear and simple exhaustion, and she's freshly aware of her own flushed, tight skin and guesses she must look like how it feels and how it felt at the time: a bad sunburn. She might peel. That could be interesting to attempt to explain to Axel, though if her experience holds, he won't prod much. He'll give her plenty of looks but he'll basically leave her alone.

But for right now she doesn't care.

She pushes up on her knees, working at her belt and unsnapping her cuff. He's tracking her hands, his own dangling loose between his thighs as he rocks back on his heels, and whereas before when he looked at her there was always some reticence, even a degree of anxiety, now she sees hunger pacing back and forth behind his eyes. It didn't just appear; she's certain he feels it all the time. He's said as much. And him in fierd, so strong over her and growling as he tugged at her clothes with his teeth. He had been playing - but also not.

How he's been, in her mind. Behind her, enormous and dark, ready to take her. Poised to devour.

Sooner or later something is going to break. Unless they break it first.

She hooks her thumbs beneath her waistband and starts to push her jeans down her thighs, shivering again. Knowing he'll see it. "That just for me?"

He lifts a shoulder.

"You should too."

"After you."

He's not asking, his voice low and rough. But he _is_ , under it. That's something else that's always there, and heat knots in her lower belly as she rolls back on her ass to kick her boots and jeans and panties off, reaches back to unhook her bra. This is so _easy,_ and part of her is distant enough to marvel at it, but most of her is lost in the _Now_ of what's happening, her skin prickling with goosebumps as the cool air touches it. Nipples hardening.

Lost in it, and everything else feels even more unimportant. Even more unreal.

She shuffles forward on her knees, and then on a sudden wild impulse she drops to her hands and crawls to him on all fours, watches his nostrils flare and his breath catch in his throat with thrumming satisfaction. She's wet, something else she's abruptly and keenly aware of - everything between her legs swollen and sensitive enough that the brush of her inner thighs against each other feels like teasing fingers, already slick.

He licks his lips. "Beth."

"You want me to do this before it gets cold, make some room." She reaches him and rises to her knees again, reaching out to lay a hand on his shoulder, but he doesn't move and she doesn't want him to. She's not sure _what_ she wants to happen now - or no, she absolutely fucking does, or at least her body is screaming for it, though she still doubts it will - but his withdrawal is not at all included on the list of possibilities. And he covers her hand with his and lowers his eyes, and she feels the power shift like the changing pressure ahead of a storm.

"Let me," he murmurs.

She blinks, not sure she gets it. "Let you-?"

"Let me do it for you." He releases a shuddering breath, squeezes her hand, and she understands. "Please."

She's seen this enough by now. _Felt_ it. It's rising into the air like the steam from the basin - the heady mix of these two things, the need to have her and the need to serve her, and she swallows, hard. She never in her fucking life expected to have someone figuratively prostrating himself before her and asking to be allowed to bathe her.

Knowing how happy it would probably make him.

She has no idea how she's supposed to say no to that.

She's just nodding when something scratches at the back of her attention and stops her, and she looks down at the clumsily bandaged wound on his forearm, her ripped shirt and the ugly slash beneath it.

"You should let me take care of that."

He follows her gaze and shakes his head, emphatic. "It's fine. Can wait."

"Let me." She reaches up and frames his face with both hands, staring into those animal eyes, staring until he flicks them away. Again she feels that wave of power swelling, thinks of how she bit his throat in her bed and how it seemed to completely undo him. She could command this and he wouldn't allow even the possibility of disobedience onto the table.

She will.

She leans in and grazes her lips against his. "Let me do it."

" _Gea,_ " he breathes, and his eyes flutter closed. "There's… box, over by the stove. Has everythin' you'd need."

She nods, shuffles away - still on her knees - and spots it, familiar: a little metal box that turns out to be heavier than it looks when she picks it up. She remembers it as she carries it back to him, sets it down on the tops of her thighs and opens it, peering in. Basic first aid supplies - bandages, gauze, scissors, needle and thread, antibacterial ointment - but also plastic sandwich bags of dried leaves and what look like flowers, rustling when she slides her hand in and pushes them aside. She glances up, Carol's voice echoing distantly through her head - specific names. Goldenrod had been one. Not yarrow. The others…

"What should I use?"

He leans closer, fingers through the bags and pulls out two, sets them aside. As he stirs the whole collection, a sweet heady fragrance drifts up to her like his hand stroking her hair and she draws it in, lifts out the bandages and scissors and ointment, closes the box. "You use herbs for everythin' like this?"

"Not just. But yeah." He holds out his arm as she begins to unwrap the strip of cloth, his eyes tracking her movements as closely as he did when she was undressing. "Can't fix it all, but usually there's somethin' can help. People don't know anymore, not most of 'em." He takes a slow breath as she reveals the wound, bends to wet the cloth in the basin. It's as bad as she expected - which is to say not nearly as bad as it was. Another day or two and it might be almost completely gone.

"What's the goldenrod for?"

"Helps stop infection."

"What about… What else did she say?"

"Comfrey? Skin growth." He draws another breath, hand clenching into a fist as she carefully wipes away the congealed blood, his eyes now mostly closed. Unobserved like this she can look at him differently, more easily, and it hits her again how much older than her he must be - well over a decade, probably closer to two - and how she doesn't feel it at all. He's _with_ her. Closer now than ever, and that she's naked and he's fully clothed makes no difference either.

It's so strange. And it's not strange at all.

"You should teach me," she says softly, reaching for the ointment. "Seems like somethin' I should know."

"Drya were always better at it than we were." Equally soft. Almost dreamy. His hand is relaxing, arm loose in her grip. "Least that's what they say. That kinda medicine. Magic."

A thin band tightens in her gut and she purses her lips. "Don't mean I'm gonna be." She pauses, fingers rubbing in little circles. "I don't know _what_ I'm gonna be. Don't even know if I want…" She trails off, shakes her head. One thing she _didn't_ want was to talk about this. But she should probably have expected it wouldn't be totally avoided.

"You are what you are." He raises his free hand, fingertips ghosting over her cheek, and when she lifts her gaze his glowing eyes are searching her face. "Same as me. Can't change it."

She angles her head, chasing the touch. She doesn't mean to and she doesn't for a second consider stopping. "Ever want to?"

He drops his hand and looks abruptly away, and after a couple moments of silence she realizes that he isn't going to answer. Not unless she commands him to. Without meaning to she stumbled over something in him, was too rough with it, and the urge to attempt some kind of apology rises in her. He didn't ask her about the scar on her wrist; there are clearly things here he wants to leave alone as well.

He has plenty of his own scars.

"Sorry," she whispers, and he makes a gesture that might once have been a shrug.

"Just…" He flicks his eyes back to her, and if anything they're even brighter. "Can we leave some shit be? For now? It don't matter. Ain't like we're short of stuff to worry about."

She swallows. Maybe she shouldn't say this, but here she goes. " _Lone mountain wolf?_ "

He winces, bares his teeth, and she's instantly sorrier than she was, opening her mouth to apologize again, but he cuts her off. "Yeah."

"Seemed like it might matter," she says quietly. She's sorry, sure - but she's also _right._

"With you and me? No. It don't." It's not even close to the most convincing thing he's ever said, but the look he gives her is nearly pleading - not exactly desperate, but everything in him is appealing to her. To her mercy. "All that other shit - just leave it outside. What's happened, back there, what we saw, what we…" He lowers his head, eyes squeezed shut. Pained. "We're gonna… Tomorrow, we're gonna have to go back to it. Tonight, I just…"

She waits, cradling his arm, and though that's the only place she's touching him, she imagines herself walking behind him, hands on his shoulders, helping to push him up a hill. Something else she can do for him, whether or not he wants it. Whether or not he asked.

She doesn't have to tell him that _she's_ serving _him_ in order to do it.

"I just want you," he finishes at last, barely a breath. "I'm so fuckin' tired. Me too. Magden… Please. Just you."

She doesn't answer. She opens the bags and packs goldenrod and comfrey against the wound, binds it up with the roll of bandages, piles everything back into the box. He doesn't speak either, and he doesn't watch her; he kneels with his eyes closed and his head bowed, looking almost as if he's praying in the candlelight of a chapel - and maybe he is. She's pretty sure Eostre is a deity who'll accept silent prayers. She doesn't seem like she expects grand gestures of devotion. And Daryl doesn't seem like one to give them.

He wants to do small things. Deep things.

So she sets the box down by the bedroll and moves more fully onto the towel, turns and takes his hands in hers. The water is still steaming, and his hands are big and warm and rough, and if he wants _her,_ she wants _them_.

Suddenly she wants them so damn much.

"You can," she says softly, and he opens his eyes, parts his lips, and the firelight breaks across his angular features like dawn.

"Thance."

He's speaking that language with her more and more, she thinks as he takes the washcloth, the soap, begins to work up a lather and moves behind her. It doesn't feel like a conscious choice; it feels like he's simply relaxing himself, his mind, going to the words that are easiest for him - when they're easy at all. Trusting her to understand enough. Which she has been. She does. And she doesn't think it's just that the odd word here and there sounds close enough to English that she can make a guess.

He speaks to her like that and she can _feel_ the meaning. The gratitude.

She shivers when he touches her, glides the cloth across the ridge of her shoulder and down her arm, and shivers again when he rinses and makes another long, gentle, soapy pass down her shoulderblade to the middle of her back. She arches and closes her eyes, lets herself tip slightly backward against his hands, and he tenses his other hand on her upper arm and begins to knead the muscle, massaging her as he washes her, streaming the last of the fear and the loss down her body with the water.

It doesn't take her long to float off into it, the warmth of the water and his hands, the cool of the air on her skin, the flickering candlelight against her eyelids and the in-and-out flow of his breath and hers. Expansion and contraction - a rhythm they both find, and when he cups her breast and strokes his thumb so lightly across her nipple, the cloth making its way down to her belly, they sigh in unison. She can hear his smile in that sigh and it passes into her as she inhales, more warmth settling in her core and trickling down between her legs, rising to heat and throbbing in her clit.

She wants him. She wanted him when she crawled to him and she wants him more now, a dense, wet ache in her cunt at the lack of him, but now she understands it, why it's there, and somehow that makes it better. Her body wants what it wants, and even if she can't feel it she knows he must be so hard he's practically busting through his fly, but at least for the moment, bodies are only bodies. They aren't the whole.

Something else she understands. She was first aware of it when she made herself come with her ass shoved into the air, but there was always more.

 _Edness a sawol._

The dirt and sweat and soot is sloughing off her, but she's not entirely surprised to see that the water in the basin isn't darkening - is almost as clear as when he set it down, except for a thin film of soap suds. Everything is smoothing out, softening, and when his hand slips down to cup her mound she spreads her legs wider without any hesitation, a low moan humming at the base of her throat.

They both knew he was headed here.

He's ostensibly still washing her, working her over with a lathered hand, but his slick fingers are tracing the channels between her inner and outer lips, rising to capture the shaft of her clit between them with gentle pressure, and the back of her head falls against his shoulder as she moans louder and cants her hips upward. More than encouragement. She's not yet demanding anything - senses this is the time to let him go slow - but she's not too far from it.

"Wanna make you feel good," he breathes against the shell of her ear. "Beth… _Lufiend…_ That's all I fuckin' want."

She doesn't answer. She gropes for his other hand and catches him around the wrist, lifts him to her tit, and he cups and squeezes as his fingers began to rub in tight, firm circles. Technically he's still new at this, but maybe it's because he can feel a little of what he does to her, because he seems to know exactly how to do it, exactly how hard and how fast, and she arches again and gasps his name, gripping his wrist and bracing herself up with her other hand on his thigh.

"You do." Knowing what it'll do to him. Do _for_ him. "You make me feel so _good_ , Daryl, oh my God… oh- _God,_ don't stop…"

Drawing her upward, coaxing, scooping up the thick cream flowing out of her to slick her even more, and she's teetering on the edge with the sounds escaping him somewhere between panting and groans - but she digs her fingers into his thigh and he stiffens, his rhythm stuttering.

"Don't come with me." She hauls in a breath and repeats it, louder. She can do this. She can do it and he'll obey her. Couldn't disobey her if he tried. And she's not afraid of that. It blasts heat through her, trembles in her core. She can command him, and he'll take unimaginable joy in being commanded. "You hear me? You… You come when I _say_ you can."

For a few seconds, nothing. Then a louder groan than she's yet heard from him, something so deeply helpless in it, and he chokes what sounds like _agendfra_ and works her even faster, as if he still means to send himself with her, _needs_ it, teeth bared against the side of her neck as her spine bows forward and she comes with a heavy, broken moan. And he doesn't stop, pounding it through her with every stroke of his fingertips, strained and rigid and whimpering against her back.

Obeying her.

He slows, a smooth downward slide as she sags backward, damp and streaked here and there with the remains of suds. He's talking again, barely a whisper, words she can't understand.

Except she can. She's heard some of them before.

 _Besorg magden… Min alif be thu._

 _Ic beon eower._

She takes a shaky breath as his fingers nudge between her pussy lips, slightly curled, and she realizes what he's doing as he withdraws them and lifts them, coated with her, and hums deep beneath his breastbone as he sucks them clean.

And for a little while neither of them moves.

She's the first to do so, fumbling for his sticky hand as a laugh escapes her, trembling at the edges. She's bathed - mostly - but there's still him, and there's still-

"Gotta do your hair." Hands on her shoulders, carefully tipping her up and forward. "Won't take too long."

Maybe it doesn't take long, but it feels like it might be hours, time blurring away as he wets her hair with cupped handfuls of water, works in shampoo and - with meticulous attention - begins to finger the knots out of her hair. Even the dull sting as he pulls now and then doesn't disrupt the golden haze through which she's drifting, doesn't jar her out of it, and she slumps forward, hands on her thighs and drowsiness creeping all through her like sunlight across a floor, and wonders how she's supposed to remain conscious by the time he's done.

And she very much wants to. This isn't anywhere near over.

But this part of it is, too soon, and she opens her eyes, blinking as she focuses on the dish of candles, the wicks floating in their pools of wax. If that can be any kind of indicator of how long they've been here, it has to be late. He's laying her hair against her back, smoothing his hands over it, something nearly reverent in the touch. Like everything else in this quarter, it doesn't bother her anymore.

"Ain't got no brush or nothin'." He sounds apologetic. "Kinda never expected I'd need one."

"Your hair? I noticed." Gentle teasing, and he breathes a laugh. She smiles faintly, relaxed as the rest of her, and swipes her hands down her face. She has no idea what kind of soap he was using - it didn't smell fruity or floral but was instead only lightly and cleanly fragrant, and not unlike the scent that struck her when she opened his odd little first aid kit. Herbs. The burns on her skin feel soothed, less heated and swollen, as if he's rubbed them with aloe.

She shrugs him away and turns, a bit unsteady, and looks at him in the shadow of her own body. He looks larger than he should be, more powerful than human muscles should allow for, and she spots an almost imperceptible quivering at the edges of him and it comes to her that he might be trying to hold himself back like he did in her bed that first time. When he _gave her the wolf._

He can't be trying to protect her from something. He has to be past that.

She reaches forward and lays her hand over his where it rests on his inner thigh. As she does, she doesn't miss the bulge straining against his fly; he has to be cramped, aching, maybe near desperate, but saying nothing about it. Simply waiting for her instruction.

Because he will. He'll wait forever if she wants him to. He'll wait until it drives him insane.

 _Not that._

But what, then?

"Your turn," she murmurs - and he doesn't quite pull back but there's a cringe in his shoulders, his head ducking, and the sudden twist in his mouth cuts anxiety into her. She's touched him before and it wasn't like this; it freaked him out, but since then he's let her touch him just about everywhere, let her get her mouth on his cock, for God's sake, so now…

She takes a breath, caught between feeling like she should pull back and wanting to press in closer.

"I don't…" he starts, and shakes his head. "Not you. Doin' it. Please."

"Why not?"

"You said we could leave some things be." He lifts his eyes to her face again, and they're like glass; there's something behind them, lurking with a darkness utterly different from the kind he's obviously comfortable in, but the barrier stands between her and it. She could break through, but. "I just don't want that."

She's quiet for a moment, looking at him and then past him at his one small window. The moon is high, bright, and the dust on the glass casts a soft halo around it. All those things about werewolves and the moon, uncontrolled changes, _curses,_ and clearly that's all bullshit - except she wonders how much of it really is.

Something isn't right with him.

"You're gonna have to tell me." She sighs and pushes wet strands of hair back from her face. "Sometime. Daryl, we're gonna… There's a lot of things. You know?"

"I know." He releases his own sigh, hands clenching around each other. As if he's literally trying to hold himself together. "There's so fuckin' much now. You're in the middle. I'm sorry."

"I think you are too."

The edge of a curl in his lips, wry. "I was always in the shit. Ain't nothin' new."

"Really?"

He hesitates, then drops his head again, eyes closed, the reflected glow flickering out like a candle flame. And a couple of the candles _have_ gone out. The room is dimmer, the light that remains paling with the moon. "No. Not really."

And the hell of it is that he's right. There's so much. She lets it back in, the reality of it, and it's like that painting she's seen of an incubus, a horrible little troll crouched on a woman's chest. Weighing her down, squeezing her lungs. She so much as swings her attention in its direction and it's difficult to breathe. So much in what seems like no time at all, and she doesn't see any way out of it. She can't go back.

But that was true a year ago.

Maybe it was true long before that.

This place is supposed to be _safe haven._ She grits her teeth, pushes it back. She can be strong enough. Even if only for a while.

"You should still wash up," she says quietly, and when the inspiration arrives she takes it. Can give it to him, and know that it's something. "Do it yourself then." The tension edging through his muscles seems to ease out of him and he nods, but she doesn't stop there. "I'm gonna watch."

He stares at her, motionless, hands passing over each other as if he's already handling the soap. It has to be her imagination, but though she isn't touching him she could swear she _feels_ the bulge in his pants throb under her palm.

She just came, but that's never held back another round in her, not when she's already humming like this, and it doesn't now. She moves past him - again on all fours - returns to the bedroll and arranges herself facing him, spreads her legs and settles her hand between them with her fingertips ghosting over her pussy. "Do it now."

He does.

He doesn't go slow, doesn't put on any kind of blatant show for her, but he also doesn't rush as he starts to remove his clothes, shirt off to reveal his muscular shoulders and core, his boots, his belt and his fly, and when he thumbs his jeans down his hips and hisses in a breath as his cock springs free, she doesn't try to keep back her moan, nudging a finger between her lips and pressing at her entrance, pressing inside. He's not looking at her as he shifts them past his ankles and sends them to join his shirt, and then he's naked and kneeling in front of her, nearly close enough to put her hand on, and she pushes her finger in deeper, withdraws, thrusts back in with a quiet squelch.

He finds the cloth, finds the small bar of soap, and starts to wash himself.

He's still not hurrying, working the soap over his neck and arms and chest, and she doesn't hurry any more than he does, teasing herself as she gazes at him, leaning back on one hand so she can spread herself wider. And she doesn't mean to be tormenting him, but she can't help thinking it and willing silently that he know it: that this is what he could have if he mated with her, this pussy that would have to feel so wonderfully tight around him, his huge cock buried deep in her hot wetness, the juices trickling out of her and down into the crack of her ass. Soaking into the bedding beneath her, but she doubts very much that he'll mind. Once again his nostrils are flaring, scenting her; this is one thing they're going to _have_ to address, and she doesn't think it can wait much longer.

But now he's moving on to his hair, starting to rinse, glistening red and gold in the light…

"Play with yourself."

The words just come and he freezes, twitching his head up, hand unmoving between his inner thighs. Excellent timing, and she smiles, her fingers moving faster. "You heard me. Jerk off." She passes her tongue across her lips; he's smaller like this. She could get all of him in her mouth with comparably considerable ease. "You've been good for me. You can come. Make yourself come."

That word again, the word she can guess the meaning of - _agendfra_ \- and he drops the cloth and curls his hand around his shaft, bites down on his bottom lip as he starts to stroke himself.

He's not gentle with it. He curls forward, grip tight and his movement rapid, teeth bared as he releases an animal whine. She pulls out of her pussy and returns briefly to her clit, rubbing in equally rapid circles and gasping, because if he's going to come she wants to help him do it, make it even better for him, her nerves crying out as her climax approaches like an oncoming train. She's so fucking _wet,_ just like always now, back down and pumping out of her with every thrust of her fingers - two, scissoring and stretching herself as she imagines taking him. How _big_ he is, how's she's seen him on his knees in the grass with his long wolf tongue fucking into her, and she's thinking _come for me, oh fuck, come on_ as she groans strained and ragged in the core of her chest.

He's panting her name. Panting it in as hard a rhythm as his hand, precome dripping down his fist, tipping forward to brace himself on one hand with his blazing eyes locked on her and his teeth long and sharp and gleaming, and she's honestly not sure which of them comes first, her body wrenching forward and a wordless cry ripping out of her as he cries out to echo her, spurting over the floor and spilling thick down his fingers.

And again, it might be her imagination, that he's moaning _thank you._

 _Thank you._

She stays where she is for a moment or two, shaky laughter bubbling up inside her, and she lets it out as she lowers herself to the bedroll, sticky hand falling to her side. She's not at all dry in any respect, and neither is he, but she she doesn't give a fuck about soap or water or come; she lifts her other hand and beckons weakly. Her weariness is flowing back into her, into the space her orgasm left, and she's not sure how much more she can move at all.

She doesn't have to. Neither does he.

"C'mon," she hears herself saying, the words riding out on a sigh. "Come sleep with me."

He comes to her without a word - on all fours, like she did - and in the last of the light he doesn't look human at all. He crouches over her for a few seconds as she straightens herself out and fumbles for one of the blankets, then he leans over and takes it from her, pulling it over both of them as he lies down beside her. He's still not speaking when he wraps his arms around her and gathers her in, and there's no silky fur against her skin, no claws scratching pleasantly against her back, but all that is in there, behind the form he's wearing, and she can call it out to her anytime she wants to.

She tucks her head under his chin and smiles against his throat. "I wanna make you feel good too."

"You do." Lips against her brow. Barest hint of teeth. "All the time, girl. All the goddamn time."

Except she won't. Sooner or later she won't. Sooner or later it'll genuinely begin to hurt him, not having what he wants, what _they_ want - it probably is already. She can do all the _leaving be_ in the goddamn universe, and it won't change that.

Maybe the end of the world isn't the best time to deal with something like this. But there was never going to be a _good_ time. _Good timing_ was never a factor here. Nothing about this insanity has never been ideal.

There's no going back.

She's exhausted beyond anything she can remember, weary to her marrow. But long after the last of the candles drown in their wax, she lies awake. His breathing deepens, slows, and when she turns and nestles herself back into the curve of his body, he only stirs enough to curl an arm around her, hand cupping her tit, murmuring something incomprehensible and drifting off into whatever kind internal darkness he's found.

She stares at the moon, watches it until it's risen beyond the border of the window and out of view. No going back. And safe haven or no, she can still smell ashes, singed hair, burning flesh.

She knows it won't be the last time.


	34. you are the moon that breaks the night

**Chapter 34: you are the moon that breaks the night**

 _Wake up, daughter._

No. She stirs, restless - resistant. She doesn't want this now. She's still tired, hasn't rested near enough, and anyway, hasn't she been dealing with this bullshit for what feels like weeks? Longer? She _has_ been dealing with it longer. A fuck of a lot longer. She's beyond due for a goddamn break.

She groans and turns away, but there's no _away_ to turn to; she's lying on her back in the meadow - _the_ meadow - the stars scattering light all around her, so brilliant she has to close her eyes. The grass whispers - whispers like _him,_ with a voice very much like his, words she can almost understand. The breeze strokes her hair, her naked skin, and as she draws her legs slightly up and bends her knees, heat pulses through her core and settles wet between her thighs.

But he's not here. It's just her.

And _her._

 _Daughter, I don't have time for this._

She grits her teeth. _Fuck you._ She wants to get the fuck away from here, wants to go back; if she's going to be doing any _waking up_ she wants it to be in his arms, his quiet den and a quiet night, and she wants to be awake only long enough to know these things before she sleeps again.

Nothing in this meadow has ever gone particularly well for her.

 _Fuck_ you, _daughter. That's rather the point._ Warmth near her, shifting of air that accompanies the movement of a body; she half-opens one eye, squints up into the starlight, and finds herself overshadowed by a crouching human form - a woman, though she's nothing more than a dark shape against the glittering sky, and it's impossible to see much more of her.

Except she's silver at her curving edges. Her pale hair, her skin - naked as Beth is. And she's brightening as Beth watches, seeming to fill with a glow swelling from her own core through partially translucent flesh, beaming from her eyes and her fingers where they dangle between her knees. Even brighter low in her belly. Her tongue, highlighting the sardonic curve of her smile.

The urge to move is electric, shivering all through Beth's nerves, sparking, furious. And yes, it _is_ very much like anger. She didn't like this woman since the night she met her, and her feelings toward Eostre haven't improved with greater familiarity. It would be a good idea to push herself up, slide away, scramble to her feet and run.

Even if she knows there's nowhere she could go.

 _Damn right. You're on my turf now, daughter._

Beth growls, fists clenching. _I'm not your fucking daughter._

 _Unfortunately we don't get to choose our family._ Eostre cocks her head. _A fact with which my poor dear son is very well acquainted. He hasn't told you anything about that, has he?_

Got her there. Beth's hands loosen, her palms stinging from the pressure of her nails. Got her and the bitch knows it, that smile curling higher. It's deeply irritating. Nothing about this _isn't._

She wanted to be done with gods. None of them have ever done her any good in the end.

 _No, of course he hasn't. Carol is right about him - he's very brave. But he's terrified._

 _Of what?_

 _Of losing you. Of keeping you. Of you, daughter. Like any devoted worshipper, he fears you, much as the Israelites feared Jehovah._ She snorts a laugh. _When they weren't being unbelievably exasperating. I never envied Him those particular_ Chosen People. _Always kind of wondered what the fuck He was thinking there._

Beth rolls her eyes, exhales at the sky. _If you aren't gonna let me go, bitch, get to the goddamn point._

All at once Eostre plunges down, reaching out to grip Beth's jaw with fingers so hot they freeze against her skin, all distinction between temperatures lost - even more infuriatingly, flaring the heat between her legs. _Watch your mouth, kid. I know you don't like me and you don't have to, and I've never been all that fond of formality, but I've still got some divinity in me. Don't make me show you how much._

A pause. Silence except for the whispering of the grass - hissing, tension. Above them the stars are hard and cold as the heads of pins. Beth glowers up at her - this _goddess_ who won't leave her alone, who she suspects very strongly can be blamed for just about everything.

Except that means also…

 _Yes. You can blame me for him._ She shakes her head as she releases Beth's jaw. _Before you ask, no, I didn't throw you two together. I didn't intend that. There are forces at work in the multiverse besides me, and I'll admit that I'm not anywhere near the most powerful of them. But him…_ She goes quiet for a moment, her eyes turned down and abruptly distant, and when she speaks again there's a thread of something like tired sadness in her low, smooth voice. _I've been watching him for a long time. Tried to help him where I could, but he needed pain. He has a job to do. His life has been hard, and what remains of it isn't going to get any easier._

Beth watches her, wordless and unmoving. The urge to do the latter has faded beneath a knot of dull pain in her gut, and as for the former… She has no idea what she's supposed to say to this. She isn't sure she should say anything at all. And even if she could think of something, Eostre doesn't give her a chance; those glowing eyes flick back up to hers, and a sigh escapes that equally glowing mouth.

 _I'll show you. What he won't tell you. Some of it, anyway. I don't think all of it should be mine to show._

And here _is_ something she can say. She's opening her mouth to do so - _what the hell are you-_ And she's falling through the ground, grass tickling past her cheeks and hips and thighs and gone as roaring, starless darkness engulfs her and she plunges into

* * *

 _the lake all murky and brown, gritty mud in his mouth as he flounders, laughing from the shore, this is the only way he'll learn and that in itself is a lesson, that the only thing to do is toss himself in or be tossed and swim or drown, and crawling out over the silt of the bank, little boy dripping and shivering and looking up at this man who has been hurting him from the time of his earliest memories, this monster with long sharp teeth and green-gold mirror eyes in the dark, shoving the point of a bolt into his face and saying he should be dead and cursing him for a stupid pathetic scrawny magham pup who fell out of the loose cunt of his whore of a mother who can't keep her legs closed, and who knows if he's even really his and gyden he wishes he wasn't, fucking shameful, worse than his niehsta brother who tucked his tail between his legs and slunk away dragging his hindquarters like a dog taking a runny shit, going to bed at night to dreams of his whore of a mother burning to drunken death in her bed, skin blackened and cracking and the stench of overdone meat, knowing that it very well might not have truly been an accident, that she left him because everyone leaves him except this monster of a father, knocking him to the filthy floor and gripping him by the hair and slamming his face against it until blood trickles over his lips and chin, cutting a switch from outside like a fucking cliche and flinging it again and again at his bare back until more blood runs hot down the dip of his spine into the crack of his ass and he can't try to crawl away anymore, he crumples and the world grays out and light explodes in on him, scorches him from the inside out and breaks all his bones at once, and he's screaming his throat raw and writhing in the dust and gaping with tear-blurred eyes at hands that aren't hands anymore, gleaming claws, and he understands what's happening but he wasn't ready except now maybe he doesn't have to take it anymore and he's throwing himself to his feet and whirling and snarling and ready to kill, yes, his own fucking father, he would, but he's cuffed so hard he yelps and tumbles back onto his ass and cringes away, whining with blood pouring from the deep scratches raked across his face, belly up and exposing his throat and knowing he's going to die like this. Sooner or later he's going to fucking die._

 _Except he doesn't._

 _Running, running through the dark, long nights huddled alone and cold under the moon, moaning prayers to a goddess who never loved him enough to help him until there she is in front of him, hands warm on his head and fingers stroking through his fur and sorry she didn't come to him before, walking with him and talking to him in his dreams and his waking hours, telling him stories and giving him lessons, giving him what he was never given, teaching him to fight and to heal himself and to weave magic from the raw stuff of the world. Setting the light of Mona into his head and heart. Blessing him with the eye of sister Artemis and putting the bow into his hands._

You are _Spyre,_ child. Yours is the track and the scent and the wild hunt.

 _And he is hunting. He hunts for years and years, finally finding what he's looking for but it's horrible, it's a fucking nightmare, on his knees and rifles loaded with silver pointed at his head as they all laugh and jeer and he gazes up into those eyes he wanted to see again more than anything else in the world, a goddess whispering that he has no choice now but to kill everything he can touch, body exploding upward and outward and silver grooving through his flesh, roaring and shattering one of them against a wall and ripping another one open and spilling guts across the ground and running again, hurtling into the dark swift as a bolt with them shrieking at his heels like a pack of Ytend, running through rain-slick streets until his chest is about to burst wide open, and falling at the feet of a steel-eyed man with a gun._

 _And a woman who gathers him into her kind arms, and makes the pain go away. And he looks into her eyes and sees the light of the moon. In all of them, he sees the light of Sister Moon._

 _And he's not running alone anymore._

 _He's not_ lone _at all._

* * *

Not moonlight in her eyes. Fire.

Not fire. Candles. He's relit them, and she shifts under the blanket and rolls more fully onto her side, her hands curled between her breasts and her legs sliding into the warmth his body left behind. She blinks and he comes into focus: sitting crosslegged a few feet away from her, still naked, his back partially turned toward her with the scars cutting horribly dark across it and his hand moving in a smooth, rhythmic sweep. A whispery grating noise; she catches a golden flash and knows he's sharpening his knife.

She can't see his face.

"I looked for him for fifteen fuckin' years," he says softly, not looking up. Not breaking his rhythm. "More. Found him a few months ago." He pauses, and when he speaks again she can hear a smile in his voice, thin and sharp as the edge of a blade. "Wasn't what I was hopin'."

She's silent. Once again when it comes to what she might say she's at a loss. He doesn't sound angry, not even particularly upset - or if he is, it's not with her. But there's pain there, a lot of it, and sharper than his smile. She feels it like the ghost of a cut across her skin. Deep.

Deep as the wounds that became the scars on his back.

"Your brother," she whispers finally, and he nods.

"He got away. He was the strong one." He exhales - a laugh, she thinks. Or something like it. "I was the _eafora._ But I was weak. I wasn't nothin'. Not like it mattered. We didn't have no cyne. We were _wraca._ Exiles." His hand stops, the blade motionless against the whetstone. Again, she sees it flash. "So I never had no honor. _He_ took it from me. Before I was even fuckin' born, he took it."

He's quiet again, quiet and still, and after another minute or two she pushes herself up to sit, the blanket pooling around her hips. It was a chilly night when he brought her here, but the air in the room is warm. Perhaps magic. Perhaps not.

"Your dad?"

Another nod, slow.

"Why was he exiled?" Because she senses something has broken open and now she can ask these things if she's careful with him, and he doesn't hesitate.

"I dunno. I never knew." He lifts his head, seems to be focusing on nothing at all. "Don't matter either."

She's about to argue. Then she doesn't; she gazes down at her hands curled in her lap, throat tight. No, it probably doesn't matter. The reason changes nothing regarding the end.

"You do have honor." She looks up, biting her lip. "I've seen it."

He raises the knife, turns it in the light. It appears to shimmer, as if the flame is seeping into it and melding, changing its structure at the atomic level. "I do now. I got a pack." He turns his head and his eyes are shining brighter than the knife, warm. More than warm. "Got you."

She shakes her head. It's not right. The dream is churning in her, gripping her with waves of something dangerously close to nausea, because it's all wrong. He doesn't understand. Neither does she, but even so. "You had it before that."

"How much did you see?"

Her mouth is dry but somehow she swallows. "How did you know?"

"You were talkin' in your sleep." Another smile, thin as the one before it. "And it's the kinda shit _she'd_ do."

"Yeah. It is." She sighs and draws her knees up against her chest, hugs them and rests her chin on their tops. "I saw… I didn't get a lot of it. Your dad beat you. Worse. You ran away. _She_ came to you then. Right?"

Nod. His face is unreadable.

"And your brother. Somethin' happened when you found him. Somethin' bad. I saw guns." He doesn't move but she sees him stiffen, spine going rigid, and she can nearly feel the ice racing through him. "You fought, got free, ran. That's how you met Rick and… and the others."

He ducks his head and says nothing for what feels like a long time. She doesn't push him. Doesn't even nudge. Maybe she doesn't understand all of it, but she understands enough to get this much, why it was so hard for him to tell. Why it _is_ so hard. Why he might feel ashamed. Even if it's the exact opposite of what he should feel.

He's been made to feel so many things he shouldn't.

"He got it worse than me," he says softly. "He wasn't born what he _should've been._ Human. What our dad did to him made him mean. Those people he was with…" He holds up the knife again and appears to examine it, peering at the edge. "Only met 'em that once. But I think they hunt us."

"Your people. Hathsta." She draws a slow breath. "Why?"

"No fuckin' idea. Maybe they don't need a reason."

"That was…" She stares at him as it hits her, a quick slap of realization. A piece slotting into place. "What Pythia said-"

Flat. "Yeah."

 _Whatever this is, it's not your fault._

She combs a hand through her hair, pushes it out of her face and rubs at her eyes. They're stinging, and it feels like the memory of smoke. Echoes of screams in her ears. Being hunted. Being caught. "Daryl."

He gazes at her, jaw working. "You're in danger just bein' with me. You heard her. Whoever they are, they're comin'."

"I'd be in danger _anyway._ "

"Whole thing is so _fucked up_." He drops the whetstone, drops the knife with a clatter, and curls inward as his head sinks between his hands, fingers tensing into hooks. He looks almost as if he's clawing at himself, at his scalp, and she kicks the blanket away and scrambles to him, kneels in front of him, grapples at his wrists and pulls.

" _Stop._ "

Instantly, he does. He doesn't do anything else. He sits there, frozen in her grip with his face lost in the shadow of his hair - except for the terrible grimace stretching his mouth, lips peeling back from his teeth. Once she might have been afraid he would bite her, but that feels like another lifetime. It _is_ another lifetime. Now she's in this one, and she's with him.

And he needs her.

"I'd be in danger anyway," she repeats, softer, leaning close. He doesn't lean into her, but he also doesn't cringe, and that's good. "You know that."

"I have to keep you safe." He raises his head, eyes wide and frightened and dark with what she can only identify as anguish, and he hauls in a ragged breath. "Nothin' else matters. Not what anyone else wants. Not what _I_ want. Just you."

"So you do that. The rest of this shit? It's _not your fault._ " She tightens her hold on his wrists, and only a small part of her spares the attention to notice the light beginning to gather at her fingertips. "You didn't make me a goddamn _witch._ You didn't kill my family. You didn't try to kill me. You _saved_ me. I'd probably be _dead_ if it wasn't for you." All at once a roaring heat that has nothing to do with her cunt is flooding up through her and she wants to _shake_ him. She does, a little, and he lets her, gazing speechless at her with a hundred different emotions contorting his features. "I _want_ you with me. I don't give a fuck what else it means. I don't give a fuck about a _mating bond_ or whatever the hell it is. I don't give a fuck about _Scyld._ My life was shit before you found me, and maybe it's not any safer now but I swear to whatever god you want, Daryl, it's a _fuck_ of a lot better."

She stops, breathing hard, and he stares at her with his lips slightly parted and all his fear gone. Clear shock has chased it off, and he blinks as if he's simply trying to understand her, his hands and arms loose. All of him is loose. Once again she's broken something down in him, and to the extent that she can think about it at all, she can't imagine a world in which she's sorry.

There's light now, and it's not the candles. It's pale, bright. It's all around them, and she understands with no surprise that she's the source.

"I love you," she whispers. "It's ridiculous, it's so stupid, I know… But I do. I love you, Daryl."

The silence is complete, abrupt, and it settles around them like the light. He's still staring at her, the shock piercing even deeper, and when she lowers her head and presses her lips to his scarred knuckles, he lets out a sob.

"You shouldn't."

She smiles against his fingers. She said it and it was easy, because it's been true for a while. "Tough shit."

" _Beth_."

He has time to gasp that much before she drags him in.

She's kissed him hard. She hasn't kissed him like this. She releases his wrists and buries her hands in his hair and clenches so tight she has to be hurting him, and when she clambers awkwardly over him and half falls into his lap he's already pulling her with his fingertips digging into her hips. She's _ravenous,_ clacking their teeth together as she thrusts her tongue alongside his - nearly fucking his mouth with it - and he only moans and opens wider to her, his blunt nails raking up her back and raising goosebumps all along her arms.

Too blunt. That's not what she wants. His incisors cut shallowly into her lower lip as he sucks at her, spilling the taste of copper into her mouth, but it's not enough. There's more in him, waiting for her. Her pussy is _burning_ for him, wet and swollen and pulsing with every pound of her heart, and she can feel his cock nudging her belly as he rocks against her, warm smears of precome across her skin.

"Give me the wolf." She hisses it against his mouth, yanking his head back and scraping her teeth down his throat, biting a harsh, desperate groan out of him as he arches. "Daryl… Oh _fuck,_ give it to me now."

And he jerks away - only a few inches, stopped by her hand in his hair - panting and staring at her with fear once again shivering behind his eyes. Shivering through all of him. Fear - and so much need she can feel it radiating from him like a goddamn sun.

"Don't… Don't ask me for that." His arms tighten around her, if anything holding her closer. Clinging to her. "Shit, _please,_ I can't fuckin' _do_ that to you, I can't risk-"

She slips her hand free, frames his face and tips her forehead against his, breathes him in. She's not about to argue with him; she doesn't doubt that there's something here worth fearing. But there's more than only that, and she can sense it as if it's her own pain - an awful wrenching in her gut, like the deepest hunger she's ever felt. "It's hurtin' you, not havin' it."

"I'm alright."

"No. You're not."

She presses in and up, kisses him again - softer, and he moans her name and the hunger flares, and like a gift it comes to her, what she might do. She breaks the kiss and leans against him, licking her own blood off her lips and stroking her thumbs over his cheeks. "There's somethin' we can try."

A violent shudder rolls through him and his hips follow it, the head of his cock rubbing slick against her belly and twitching in her palm when she reaches between them and takes him in her hand. "What?"

"Do you have to fuck me?"

He pulls back again and searches her face, brow furrowed with obvious confusion. "Do I have to-"

"For the bond. Is that what does it?"

Brief hesitation, more confusion - then he nods shakily. "Yeah. Has to be that."

"Change for me."

The whimper that escapes him is broken, almost pained. "Beth…"

"Trust me." Her lips on his mouth, his cheek, his jaw and back to his throat, over the small bisected circle her teeth left there. " _Trust me_. I love you."

He breathes her name again and obeys her.

It's bizarre and it's amazing, the feeling of it happening _against_ her, _beneath_ her: the cracking bone and tearing of muscle so sharp and sudden she has no idea how he's not screaming in agony, his skin stretching as he grows all around her, growling rough between his sharpening teeth. Fur sprouting under her touch, first bristling and then softer as it lengthens, silky against her thighs and tits, claws digging into her back. And his fucking _cock_ swelling in her hand - and it's so much like something out of some utterly ludicrous porn that laughter flutters in her chest, but her groan swallows it and she strokes him, precome trickling hot and slippery over her fingers, and he tilts his head back and bares his gleaming teeth and whines.

"You have to trust me." She reaches up with her free hand and lays it against his muzzle, tugging him down and licking at his tongue when he flicks it out to greet her. "But you tell me if I'm wrong. Okay? You tell me if it feels wrong."

Another whine forces out of him and he ducks his head in what she takes as a nod, but she doesn't immediately move. She rolls in his lap - legs spread so wide to hook over his thighs, the tension in her hamstrings almost painful - and angles her hips so that her clit finds friction at the base of his cock, grinding her pussy against his shaft as she jerks him in smooth, steady pulls. The sounds twisting out of him are ragged and frantic, and he holds her up with both enormous paws cupping her back, dipping his head to swirl his tongue over the tight little buds of her nipples as she gasps _don't come, don't you fuckin' come, oh my god…_

She does. She does with a deep spasm and a wail, riding it and riding the underside of his dick and fumbling at his gloriously thick fur with her sticky hands. Gasping his name and sagging backward, and again when he licks her mouth she licks him back.

Kissing like this. It's different. But it's not.

He folds her in against him and holds her, his cock still huge and throbbing in her fist and his breath coming in trembling heaves. But he'll wait for her. He'll wait as long as she needs him to.

She's more than content with that. Because so is he.

He's sliding his claws through her hair when she finally lifts herself away from him, hands on his chest, tipping clumsily back and out of his lap with a breathless laugh. He leans forward almost like he's ready to rise onto four feet and chase her, spring at her and pounce, but he only tracks her as she half crawls back to the bedroll, his hungry gaze gliding over her like his tongue could-

And freezing, cock bobbing against his stomach and one paw-hand spread out in front of him as she rolls onto her hands and knees and lowers herself onto her elbows, her cheek pressing into the blankets and her ass high in the air.

The groan rips out of him, painful and lost and torn at the end; he sounds nearly despairing, close to weeping, and as she watches he crumples with his tongue lolling and his claws hooked into the floor. He doesn't have to say anything - in his own language or any other - for her to know the words beating at his head.

 _Don't do this to me._

"It's alright." She extends her hand, palm up and fingers curled, and it's not difficult to smile at him. He _hurts_ with wanting her, he does, and she can feel it like iron knitting itself around her spine, but this is right. This isn't exactly what he needs, but it's still right. "C'mere."

When he goes to her he's dragging himself, not far from limping with his cock hanging thick and heavy beneath him, and she turns, cranes her head to look over her shoulder and reaches back along her side, finds his paw braced against the blanket and lays her fingers over his. They're so big and she feels so small, but there's no weakness in this.

She's strong for him.

It's her dream, and closer than she's ever been. It slams into her - deep into her cunt - what this is and how it looks and how fucking _close_ to it they are, walking along the edge of his knife with potential disaster on either side. She knew this was dangerous when the idea broke into her mind and she's quivering with it, all fear and fierce need. Because he's crouching behind her now with every breath a growl, massive and dark, claws on her hip as he nuzzles at her. He noses at her pussy, cool and wet and making her jump and then slapping a spasm out of her as he bends low and licks firm and eager from her mound to the crack of her ass. She can feel him struggling, wrestling with himself, and there's no way he can keep winning.

He's going to seize her hips and yank her in and _impale_ her, and this could all end.

She stretches a hand beneath her and gropes for him, and her breath hitches in her chest when she feels precome dripping warm and slick into her cupped palm. Her fingers graze him and slip away and he sobs, breath puffing against the back of her neck, and when she touches him a second time she manages to hold on, tugging at him.

Guiding him.

"Like this." It's thunder in her head, stormclouds seething above them and flickering with hidden lightning. He's so strong and so _good_ and she could have him because she's _supposed_ to have him inside her, taking her and giving her everything he can - she knows he'd be gentle with her even if he was also rough as a beast.

Because he loves her.

He's still confused and it's filling the helpless sounds rumbling out of his chest, lost between _fuck yes_ and _please no,_ and all she could ever do was show him; she pulls him and he pushes forward, not into her cunt but lower - just low enough to slide his cock between her clenched thighs, so wet with her juices and his precome… and so wonderfully easy.

Like it's supposed to be. Almost.

He snarls as he pushes between her legs, stiffens and then does what she knew he would do: he clamps his paws on her hips and _thrusts_ until he's flush with her, bared teeth and claws digging into her skin nearly to the point of pain, and her head falls between her shoulders as a cry bursts out of her.

 _So fucking close._

He's so soft above her. He's so powerful. He's so _sweet_ to her, licking at the nape of her neck and the knob of her spine beneath, clasping her with a care she feels in his bones and in hers. The desperate ache that traveled from him into her has bloomed into something brilliant and light in her core, flowing warm through her veins and tingling in her fingertips. She wants to release peals of laughter, delight fluttering under her breastbone; God, as he rolls his hips back and thrusts again, she could fucking _fly._

 _I love you._ Fisting the blanket and rocking against him as he starts to rut between her thighs, every slide of his cock stroking her pussy and nudging her swollen clit, and she squeezes her eyes shut and sobs it over and over - or in her head, where she's certain he can hear it just as well. _I love you, Daryl, I love you I love you I love you._ And he hasn't stopped snarling, would sound vicious to her if she didn't know so much better, words battering - jagged-edged - up through his throat.

 _Lufiend… Ah,_ gyden, _ormate besorg…_

 _Afena._

No.

Not yet.

But already his rhythm is beginning to stutter, hers along with him as every thrust pulses searing pleasure into her cunt, and she lifts her head and snarls with him, every muscle impossibly tense - tightening for him, like she would if he was in her, tightening to milk his climax out of him. She can anyway and she _is,_ that brilliance in her abruptly splitting her open and pouring light through her into him, and he howls as he wrenches into a convulsion and his head twists sideways and his jaws snap shut on the top of her spine. Come spurts against her belly and runs hot down her thighs, her own wetness mingling with it as she lets out a cry, arches into him, gushes over his shaft and soars.

All her bones melt away at once and she starts to fall but he holds her up, paw beneath her middle and supporting her, his teeth still closed on the back of her neck. Pinning her in place.

It's a hard bite. He might be breaking her skin. It should hurt.

It doesn't.

She relaxes into it - his paw and his jaws - her breathing starting to slow and their come cooling on her skin. It's not just that it doesn't hurt; it feels _safe,_ that he has her and he's not letting her go, and she imagines it with a fine little shiver; him holding onto her and so gentle and strong inside her, his _seed_ flowing into her…

She doesn't know what she wants.

But there are so many things she might.

She has no idea how much later it is when he finally releases her and lowers her down, and that's something that really and truly doesn't matter. She curls into the blankets with a slow sigh, a total mess and not caring. He remains crouched over her, licking softly at where he bit her and over her shoulders and down her spine, lapping away her sweat. Nosing between her sticky thighs, licking her there too and tickling a weary giggle out of her as she squirms.

Just for now, there's nothing human in him at all. And she doesn't feel like much less of an animal.

She turns onto her back and gazes up at him, a massive shadow looming over her in the last of the candlelight, his eyes glittering with something like wonder as he gazes back. And when he ducks his head and flicks his tongue against her mouth, she parts her lips and sucks at him.

"Magden," he whispers when he lifts his head, and she raises a hand and strokes her fingers up his muzzle as he combs damp strands of her hair away from her brow with the tips of his claws.

Not _consummated._ She can feel it. The need is still there in him - in her. But it's not as bad. It's not pain.

They've eased it. For a while. And what she's feeling now…

"I want you," she murmurs, both hands on his muzzle and up to the sides of his face, caressing his fur. His eyes slip half closed and he lowers his head again and draws a breath. "Ain't even just about this. It's about everythin'. And I don't _care_ how dangerous it is, bein' with you."

"Ic cearu."

Once again she needs no translation. _I care._

"You're gonna have to get over it." She's smiling, but she means it completely, and she doubts she has to make that any clearer. His mouth twists, not quite a wince, and she leans up and kisses his nose.

She likes doing that. No idea why, but she does.

"If what you people are sayin' is true, if I get any of it… It's all dangerous now." She pauses, her fingers working through his fur. "You saw some of it. What I saw, with Pythia."

Not looking at her, he nods.

"That was before I even met you. I was already part of this. Whatever the hell it is." She grips him, pulls slightly. "You can't stop it anyway. When I met you, you said I was stuck with you. You're stuck with me. So stop worryin' so much about it."

He sighs and sinks down to lie at her side, and when she rolls toward him and nestles against him he wraps his arms around her, sighs again when she buries her face in his fur. "Ne alimpan."

"I know." _Not gonna happen._ "But I need you to try." She presses her lips to the thudding pulse at the base of his throat, pressing closer. She's basically a human disaster area, her hair in knots and her thighs and belly streaked with come, and she's too exhausted to allow it to matter. She's _with_ him, dawn can't be too far off, and for the present she's found a way to give them both some peace. And more. A hell of a lot more. "For me."

She feels another nod and at the same time he loosens. Not quite as relaxed as she is, but it's something. Whatever time they still have to hide in, whatever night they've got left, she thinks they'll both sleep through it.

"Put it away for now," she breathes, setting her ear over his heart. As strong as his pulse was, this is even stronger, a steady drumbeat beneath her backed by the tidal rush of air in and out of his lungs. Comforting. Everything about him is, now. "You said you wanted to. Just put it away. I'm here."

This time there's no lag. She drifts off as she feels him doing the same, as the sky is barely beginning to lighten - that same faded rose as the sky over the beach. But this time there will be sunlight. And as it turns out, that counts for a great deal.

It counts for more than she ever imagined.


	35. baby put me on your flight

**Chapter 35: baby put me on your flight**

She fell asleep with light. She wakes up that way.

Not thin dawn light. It's brilliant even through her closed eyelids, and it hits her in the face just as consciousness flows into her, jarring. It's warm and the warmth is gentle, but that bright red is something she's not prepared for, and she groans softly and rolls away from it, groping for a blanket to pull over her head.

What her fingers close on is not _her_ blanket. It's thicker, rougher, scratchier - and that's when she realizes the surface under her has far less give than it should. It's not hard, but it's too unyielding to be a mattress, and she presses a hand flat against it, feeling.

She's naked. There's a slight stickiness between her legs - noticeable but not unpleasant. The back of her neck is aching a bit. Her hips. Her face feels tight and too warm, like a sunburn.

Warmth of the sun. Of her skin. And of a body very close to hers.

She opens her eyes and turns her head, blinking, and he's looking down at her.

He's sitting with his knees drawn up and his forearms resting on their tops, and he's watching her with a cigarette loose between his fingers, smoke flowing from his parted lips and curling lazily into the air. He's naked, the blanket pooled around his waist. That last is not at all unusual by now, but the rest-

And she's _here_. Not in her own bed.

And last night crashes in on her - fire and the sheen of his wet skin in its light, his hands and his tongue, claws, teeth, the softness of his fur and his size and power over her as he rutted against her and howled his completion - and she draws a sharp little breath.

He cocks his head, disheveled hair falling partially over his cheek. He's smiling - very faint, but it's as warm as the sun.

"Hey."

"Hey," she breathes, reaches out without thinking and grazes his bare hip with her fingertips.

She's actually the smallest bit disappointed that he's reassumed his human form - though it's decidedly nice to look at right now. The light from the window above her is pouring all over him, catching deep browns and reds in his otherwise black hair and making his eyes glitter. Making his skin seem to glow.

 _Beautiful._ Whether or not he's a monster.

She rolls further onto her back and stretches, wincing as every one of her muscles complains. "What time is it?"

He takes a long drag, exhales, offers her the cigarette without a word. She takes it. "'bout ten."

"It feels later."

"Yeah, think back on where we were. Your sense of time's gonna be fucked up for a while." He pauses, considering something. "Like jetlag."

She returns her free hand to his hip, stroking idly, and she feels the tiny shiver as it rolls through him. It's so damn wonderful that she can do that to him. Make him feel that with barely a touch. With less than a touch, and so much more. It's the best kind of power she can imagine.

"You ever actually get jetlag?"

"Nah." He shakes his head, and what might be distant embarrassment flashes behind his eyes, but it's gone so fast she can't be sure. "Never even been on a plane."

"I never got it either. Been on a plane but I've never been outta the country." This is an odd line of conversation, given every single thing that's been happening to them in the last few days - last couple _weeks_ \- but given all of that, _odd_ probably fits better than anything. And something else she realized almost from the beginning, and which has continued to bear itself out: she enjoys simply _talking_ to him. About whatever. Even if he doesn't do a whole lot of talking. "But I guess it feels pretty much like how people say it is."

He nods, retrieves the cigarette from her. It's smoked nearly down to the filter, and he turns and crushes it out on something she can't see. There's the rustle of a pack and the flick of a lighter, and he turns back with a fresh one on his hand.

She gazes up at him, last night once more sweeping over and through her. Her hips and the back of her neck. The stickiness between her thighs. What they did.

What they came so close to doing.

"What happens now?" she asks softly, and she's not sure what exactly she's referring to.

He grunts and scratches the back of his head, and it's one more thing in a long series that, although he's doing it with a fully human arm and a fully human hand, looks utterly bestial. "Gotta get my fuckin' bike back."

And she has to go to work. Later, but she does. Bizarre normality. "What about after?"

For another long moment he looks at her, speculative. Thoughtful. She lets him look, stretching again, and as the blanket slips down her side she's freshly aware of her own naked breasts and the way his eyes glide over them, over her, the now-familiar hunger flaring in them before it dies back to that constant and nearly imperceptible smolder.

Her own flare of hunger, then, and for a few seconds she's very close to grabbing his wrist and hauling him down on top of her, demanding that he do whatever he wants with her.

But it's getting later. And there are things they have to do.

He bites the edge of his thumbnail, that hint of a smile returning. This time she would swear there's an element of awkward shyness at its edges, as if he's going to ask her something he's not certain she'll agree to, or even like the idea of. Something he's not at all used to asking.

"You wanna just… get some breakfast or somethin'?"

 _Get some breakfast._ Like normal people. Not a witch and a werewolf at the end of the fucking world, facing down an enemy - or enemies - she can't even begin to understand. Not that. Simply like _people._ Like friends. Like lovers who woke up together. Which she supposes is, at the most basic level, precisely what they are.

"Yeah. Let's do that."

He nods, briefly ducks his head, and she sees the smile widen for a second or two before he looks up again. "You like waffles?"

She grins. "I love waffles."

He hesitates, that odd shyness passing back over him, then leans swiftly down and kisses her, light but lingering, nuzzling at her jaw. "Alright."

* * *

They take the bus.

It's not like she never takes the bus. She takes it all the fucking time. She took it when she first came to find him, and that's the bus they take now - hopping on at the corner stop down the street from the warehouse parking lot, beneath a sign surrounded on all sides by broken concrete and weeds, diamond-scatter of broken glass and cigarette butts like ugly seed pods.

The strangeness of the whole deal comes from yet more of that bizarre normality, and how the sunlight - brighter than she can remember seeing in a while - exacerbates and reinforces it. Just before she climbs aboard, she glances back at the dark hulk of the warehouse and it's far too easy to see it as merely another derelict industrial building in a miniature city of them. Nothing unusual. No hidden meaning beneath the surface, no unseen beneath the seen.

Almost as if, for a fraction of a moment, the veil descends.

Then it's yanked away, because as she turns to pay her fare her attention snags on the bus driver - a squat little man with a porcine nose and a lot of ear hair - and when her gaze slides over his hands she knows what caught her.

He only has three fingers on each hand.

Not an accident. Not a deformity. His hands themselves look fine, though as short and thick and hairy as the rest of him. It's simply that as far as fingers go, he isn't carrying a full complement.

For a human. But looking at him, she's pretty sure he's not.

He swivels his face around to her and narrows his already squinty eyes. "You got a problem?"

"No." She shakes her head firmly, steps backward. "No, I'm… Sorry. I'm fine."

Daryl's hand closes over her elbow and she manages not to stumble at the sudden lurch of forward movement as she follows him toward the back. The bus is barely half full, and no one so much as glances at her as she drops into the seat beside him.

"Gnome."

She blinks at him. "What?"

Daryl jerks his chin at the front of the bus and, she realizes, the driver. "Gnome. Grumpy little fuckers."

"Oh." And instead of weirding her out, it merely makes perfect sense. Of course it's a gnome. It couldn't really be anything else. "Think he knew I could see?"

"Maybe." Daryl shrugs. He seems extremely unconcerned and even a bit distracted, half gazing out the greasy window and gnawing at his thumbnail again. "Could be he guessed. You're with me and he knew what I am."

"Do you all recognize each other? You and the other…" She trails off, fumbling for the right term. _Monsters?_ That doesn't work; among other things it strikes her as far too simple. But he doesn't let her keep fumbling, and shoots her a faintly amused glance.

"Not all the time. Usually. There's a kinda… Not a smell. I dunno." He shrugs again.

"You think they could recognize me?"

He looks at her, and this time he doesn't look away, his brows drawn together. Not quite a frown. Not quite troubled. "I didn't, at first. But I didn't know what I was lookin' for. Never seen a witch. Anyway, seemed like you were just human." He pauses, his fingertips tapping on the bar of the seat in front of him. "But magic is another thing has a _smell._ You do enough of it, it's like it hangs around you. Like smoke."

"So they could. Eventually."

"You keep throwin' fire around, yeah." He gives her another of those tiny smiles, and this one isn't totally easy. "Probably."

"It's not like I planned to throw it around to begin with," she mutters, but even if this still isn't sitting comfortably in any way, at the moment it feels more like a minor annoyance than anything else. A new wrinkle in a whole bunch of other wrinkles, enough that no single one stands out all that much.

"Yeah, we're probably gonna have to deal with that." He's returned his gaze to the window and the blurred wasteland trees and battered houses and storefronts, the distraction returning along with it. She nearly pokes at him - that could mean any number of things, and she hasn't forgotten the meeting Rick scheduled for tonight where she's sure she'll have to deal with some discussion of herself in particular, but she'd like him to be clearer - but something on his face stops her. Not anxiety. Not exactly. But its distant cousin. Like a thin cloud settling over him.

The back of a city bus doesn't strike her as the best place for this kind of conversation.

She sighs and shifts her own unfocused attention toward the front and the glimpse of that thick little three-fingered hand as the driver turns the wheel. But she doesn't keep it there. Without her intending it to, her hand finds his between them and she interweaves their fingers. He stiffens slightly - then loosens and gives her a squeeze. It's firm; he's not being too careful with her. Not handling her like she's delicate. Because he never does.

Never has.

 _I love you,_ she thinks but doesn't say, and it feels different in the sunlight. It feels like something light dancing around her diaphragm. It feels hopelessly weird and it feels like something she was simply waiting around to know.

She holds his hand tighter and leans her head against his shoulder. She imagines that most people observing them would see a tired girl with a scarred, sunburned face and very grubby clothes holding hands with a decidedly disreputable-looking man probably old enough to be her father. And a few people might see a witch and a werewolf riding a bus driven by a gnome through a world far stranger than she ever imagined it could be, and one in which she nevertheless feels like she belongs.

Both those versions are true, she supposes. Equally so.

 _True_ also doesn't mean what it used to.

* * *

The bike is exactly where he left it. He didn't seem worried, and Beth had decided to trust him when it came to that, despite the fact that the parking lot itself isn't in what she would consider a great neighborhood. For all she knows, the thing is enchanted just like a lot of his stuff appears to be. Protection of some kind. Hell, maybe it turns invisible when he wants it to. It's eminently possible.

Standing beside it and him, she pauses, arrested by the club. Like the day before, heavy bass is pumping out through every crack in the structure, and it looks and feels far too _mundane_ for everything that happened there. Though that's almost certainly of a purpose. Camouflage is paramount for so much of this.

"Was there ever a time when y'all didn't have to hide?"

He's swinging his leg over, and flicks a quizzical glance at her. "Huh?"

"You. The rest of the cyne." She nods at the building. "Her. The guy she was with. Everyone behind the…" She bites her lip and turns to him. She couldn't say why, but all at once something about this seems unbearably sad. "Behind the _veil,_ I guess."

"Oh." He's quiet a few seconds, brow furrowed, then shrugs. "I mean… That's the story. Once people could probably handle it. Already thought the world was full of magic." He inserts the key, rumbles the engine to life and guns it a couple times before it falls into a low, pleased growl. "Once people thought gods were everywhere."

"Are they?"

"Yeah. Not as much as a while ago. People stop believin'..." He shrugs again. "Gods usually don't die. But they disappear. Fade." He jerks his head over his shoulder. "C'mon. I'm hungry."

She climbs on behind him, arms sliding instinctively around his waist. It feels good. More than that, it feels _right,_ like a favorite food she hasn't had in too long. The vibration of the bike beneath her and between her legs, pulsing faint heat into her, and how warm and strong he is, his heart thudding over the engine when she lays her head between his shoulderblades. She thinks of riding _him,_ clinging to him with her hands clenched in his thick fur, his power and speed as he tore through the endless twilight-dawn, and then the fire and then the Atlanta night.

Of all the things she ever thought she might possibly do with him, _that_ was never on the list, even toward the bottom. But it felt right too. Not like she was somehow using him in a way she shouldn't. Not like disrespect.

Maybe simply because she knew how happy it made him to carry her.

He guns the engine once more and the bike leaps forward as if delighted to be moving again, and the wind combs its cool fingers through her hair and trails it behind her as they swerve out of the lot and off down the street, hurtling through the intersection without slowing. She holds onto him and closes her eyes, tips her head back and flows her mind into their slipstream.

She doesn't care where he takes them. This is perfect, and there's not a single other place she wants to be.

* * *

Where he takes them turns out to be a predictably greasy spoon in the middle of South Atlanta, a low yellow building fronted by a cramped parking lot and surrounded by wasteland choked with browning vegetation. A sign painted directly onto the large front window promises twenty-four hour service, though Beth thinks that would probably go without saying.

As she climbs off the bike and pushes her windblown hair back from her face, she glances across the street and her gaze lingers on a wild, vividly colored mural painted on a fence running the considerable length of an industrial lot. It's half abstract and half depictions of happy playing children, a grinning sun rising over the skyline, the spreading green of a park. As she watches it, it seems to move, to swirl gently, and while at first she's sure it must just be her imagination, that surety doesn't last long.

No, it's definitely moving.

"Y'alright?" Soft touch on her upper arm. She pulls in a breath and turns, nods.

At this point it's really just another thing.

She follows him into the diner, and into the midst of what's clearly the last dregs of the breakfast crowd. It's approaching noon but not yet close enough for the lunch rush, and she's thankful for the lull. She's beginning to think of the vaguely unsettled feeling lurking at her edges as a kind of hangover, the effects of way too much of _everything_ all at once, and she wants peace and time to breathe. Time to _be,_ because she would bet the entirety of her upcoming paycheck that it's all going to start up again tonight.

But it's only after they're tucked into a booth and their waitress - young and pretty and extremely cheerful - takes two orders of coffee and waffles that Beth realizes the other aspect of the lull. The other part that she's thankful for.

This is the first time in what feels like a _week_ \- even if it's only a couple of days - that she's simply sitting with him, nothing to fight or run from or run _to._ Last night they were both too exhausted - and then too fucking horny - to have much in the way of real conversation, and the same was true on the beach. Everything they _have_ talked about has been heavy, weighing her down. Piling up on her until she can't think past it.

Last time they had anything like this, they were together at the literal end of the world, staring down into another one.

Now: waffles.

The world around her snaps abruptly back into focus - water-spotted silverware, sugar scattered across the tabletop by a previous occupant, clink and mutter of dishes and people, and Daryl across from her, watching her with his head tilted to one side and a faintly puzzled expression on his face.

"What?"

"I…" She breathes a laugh and leans forward, sweeping loose strands of hair behind her ears. It's hopeless. They're determined to tickle her nose and get into her eyes and there's nothing she can do about it. "I guess I just… I forgot what it was like to not be movin'. Not be doin' twenty things at once. Y'know?" She shakes her head, crooked smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. "Am I makin' any sense?"

He nods immediately, puzzlement replaced by total comprehension. "Yeah."

"And… _Waffles._ " This time her laugh is more than a breath, and she says what's been gnawing at her since they got on the bus. "It's so fuckin' _normal._ "

The tiny smile he gives her is more than a little incredulous, hint of one long incisor as the side of his mouth pulls back and up. "Normal? Seriously?"

"For us? Yeah. Normal. So it's the weirdest fuckin' thing I think I've ever done." She pauses, gazing at him as her fingers worry absently at the edge of her paper napkin. "The hell'd you do to me?"

For half a second she's afraid he might take that badly, but he _hmph_ s, flicks sugar at her. "The hell'd you do to _me,_ girl?"

A beat of silence and he locks eyes with her, and it's so wonderfully ridiculous that suddenly they're both laughing - not loud, not hard, but she feels it deep in her core and knows he does too: a warm, soft ripple.

Happy.

"I love you,' she whispers, and his laughter dies in a hard exhale as he ducks his head.

"Stop."

"I do. I told you." She extends her hand across the table and lays it over his. He's picking at his thumbnail with his middle finger, and she stills him. Feels him gradually relax. He isn't looking at her, but she senses it's not because he doesn't want to. "I meant it."

"You don't even fuckin' know me," he mutters, but he turns his hand and threads his fingers with hers, as if his body has had it with the rest of him and is taking charge of things.

"I think I know enough. I'd like to know more." She studies him, the set of his shoulders, the tension - the way she can tell that it's not bad tension. He might be uncomfortable with this, but he's not unhappy. "You know me better than anyone now."

He raises his head and then his eyes, and in another one of those flashes of jarring clarity she's piercingly aware that she's sitting in a diner with someone who is not human and therefore doesn't necessarily conform to human logic, and she has no word for how he's looking at her now.

One thing she's certain of: being _in love_ doesn't mean for him what it does for her. Some similarity, yes. She recognizes it. But it's not the same.

"Beth, I…" He swallows and drops his gaze again, fingers twitching slightly between hers. "I can't-"

 _You can,_ she starts to say, the words bursting from her in a fit of exasperation, but he cuts right back in before she manages to get the first word fully past her lips.

"I can't say it."

He's once more meeting her eyes, and there's apology on his face and in his voice, and it takes her a second or two to realize what he means. Not that some bizarre sense of honor is holding him back. Not that he thinks it might be breaking some kind of rule or violating some kind of boundary.

He literally can't. Though he wishes he could.

"I don't know how to… to say it." He shakes his head. "Words're…"

"They're not enough," she breathes, and he nods.

"Never could be."

She hazards another smile. "What about in your language?"

"Reord? No." He strokes his thumb across her knuckles and watches its progress. It's like the rest of the diner has melted into the background, fallen behind a completely different kind of veil, and it's only the two of them, joined hands over a grainy dusting of sugar. "Least nothin' that translates."

"Daryl… You don't have to. It's alright. You don't-"

"Said somethin' close," he murmurs, and his thumb ceases its slow passage. Everything in him has stopped, fixed intently on a single point she can't see. "More than once. You heard it. _Ic beon eower._ " He releases a slow breath and closes his eyes. "I belong to you."

Her heart tightens in her chest, aches all down her spine, and it's sweet in a way she can't hope to describe. Yes, she's heard it.

It was one of the first things he said to her.

More than those three words in one language, and those four in another. He might not know how to say it, words might never be enough, but they can make an approach, and she thinks she can make it the rest of the way on her own intuition. That he belongs _to_ her. But also that he should. That it's right. A place at her side - _with_ her, _in_ her. Purpose. Meaning. Something maybe not even the cyne could give him.

He _belongs._

And she saw enough last night to know that he never has before.

What she could possibly say to this, she has no fucking idea. But she should say something, because he _deserves_ it - because he deserves so _much,_ he deserves so much more than he's ever been given, and it hits her with all the force of a blow in the chest that she wants to give as much of it to him as she can, and she doesn't think _if she can_ comes to a tremendous amount in the end. Yes, he would be happy with it. He would be happy with anything from her.

That's not the point.

"You're more than I thought I'd ever have," she manages in a strained whisper.

And then the waffles arrive.

* * *

The waffles in question are _amazing,_ thick and buttery and smeared with actual butter, and as soon as her plate is slung down in front of her it comes roaring back to her - right into her goddamn stomach - that pretty much all she's had to eat in the last However Long has been in bar form. So she's not totally upset about the interruption, and then she's simply trying not to eat so fast she chokes and dies. She drowns the things in a lake of warm syrup and the sweetness makes her entire mouth hurt, met on a field of edible battle by the pleasurably sharp bitterness of the coffee. It's only after her plate is half cleared that she comes up for air and catches Daryl watching her with undisguised amusement.

He's eating a good bit slower. He's not exactly thin, but it's possible - if not probable - that he's used to operating on less food than she is. Or that he naturally _can._

Whatever. She gives him a sticky finger and dives back in.

At some point she forks the last bite into her mouth and sits surveying the aftermath, which is a plate completely bare except for a dense syrupy pool.

She briefly considers eating it with a spoon. Then, just for fun and because the option is available to her and also because she apparently enjoys shocking her former self, she considers coating Daryl's cock with it and licking him clean.

She sits back, reaching for her coffee mug with one hand as she absently sucks syrup off the forefinger of her other - and catches him watching her again, this time not nearly so amused.

It was honestly unintentional, regardless of what her imagination was already doing. But now she has his attention, and she gives him the faintest edge of a teasing smile as she moves more slowly, pushing her finger deeper and withdrawing it in a long slide that ends with a flick of her tongue. Something flares in him, dark and hot, and she guesses it's possible that she's imagining the quiet growl that drifts across the table to her.

She knows she's not.

"So," she says over the rim of her mug, determinedly casual. "Gnomes are real. So are vampires. So are gods and angels. And witches, I guess. What about unicorns?"

Daryl snorts and gulps down the rest of his own coffee, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. "Fuckin' horses wearin' strap-ons for hats. No, they ain't real. Never were. Not on this plane, anyhow."

 _Horses wearing strap-ons for hats._ She stifles a giggle. "How about… gryphons?"

"Heard there were a few out in Colorado somewhere. Rockies." He rolls a shoulder. "Probably a couple thousand left in the world. They ain't doin' any better than we are. Kinda the same reasons."

"Fairies?"

He actually shudders. She blinks at him, startled, as he nods. "The Fae? Yeah, they're real. And believe me, they ain't what you'd think." His mouth tightens, grim but not far from a darkly amused smile. "More teeth. Way more. And more eyes."

"Oh." She's not exactly surprised to have her expectations confounded yet again, but still. "Ew."

"Yep." For another moment he looks at her in meditative silence, fingers skimming aimlessly over the sides of his mug, and as her attention is caught and held by them, she imagines them moving like that over her hips. Her neck. The outer curve of her tits, her nipples. And again, that flare of heat.

Apparently she's never going to be able to stop her mind careening into this territory, not with him, so she might as well quit trying. Not that she's been trying especially hard anyway.

It's not causing her actual pain, not mating with him. Not yet, anyway, because who knows what could happen here. But _shit,_ she wants it bad. She wants anything with him. Everything. As much as she can get.

"What did you mean earlier?" She takes a slightly trembling breath; this isn't exactly an attempt to distract herself, but if it works that way, that's just fine. "You said _we're probably gonna have to deal with that._ About me. About the magic."

His eyes snap back into focus and train on her, keen. "Oh, right. Yeah." He hesitates, leans forward a little. "Can't have you tossin' fireballs around without meanin' to. You gotta control it. You gotta learn." He sighs and swipes a hand down his face, worrying at his jaw. "If you had your own people, they'd teach you. They had ways they handled kids, like us. But you ain't got that. So."

"So… Who'd teach me?"

"I dunno. None of us are galdre." He must spot her confusion, because he adds, "Sorcerers. _Specialists_ might be better, 'cause not a one of us ever used magic like a Drya. I guess…" His features twist in plain unease. "I ain't nothin' like that, but I might be the closest we got."

"'cause Eostre taught you herself."

"Yeah." A bit brusque. He doesn't want to go there. Makes a kind of sense, even if she doesn't fully understand his reluctance; he clearly hadn't wanted to last night, either.

"But you can't teach me."

He gives her an awkward half shrug. "Maybe a couple things. I dunno. We gotta see what Rick says. He's thinkin' on it, he'll have some ideas."

The way he says it grabs her and pulls her back to what she saw the first time they were together, and what she saw much later on the beach. How they all are with each other is strange enough - their greeting ritual in particular, the way the sense of intimacy approaches discomfort when she's present for it - but with Daryl and Rick it's even more so. She thinks again about what she's been vaguely aware of regarding ideas about dogs and wolves and packs, _alpha males,_ and how Daryl had obviously disliked the term. About the dominance she's seen - not just with the two of them but with everyone - but also the gentleness. The _tenderness._

And now, in his voice, the absolute certainty that this man will know what to do.

His father. His big brother. Something else he never had: someone like that, someone he can trust.

"You really care about him," she says softly. "And he cares about you."

He ducks his head, looks away. "He's _eal._ He cares about all of us."

"Yeah. But you're different."

Grunt. He shifts his gaze to his hand on the table, picking again at his thumb. Doesn't want to talk about this either, and she gets the sense that it's not for the same reason as his reluctance about learning from Eostre. But it's similar. And it's not quite embarrassment; it's like what he said before.

There aren't words for how he feels about it - or he doesn't know any - and trying to approach it that way just about makes him squirm. Emotion pounding against the inside of his skin, and he's afraid to let it go.

How he still finds it so difficult, sometimes, to change for her. To let the wolf out. To _unleash_ it on her.

"Never had this," he says, very low, his head tipped down. "Nothin' like it." He drags in a breath and seems to shake himself. "We should get goin'."

 _Okay._ "To where?"

"Your place, first. I gotta give your sigils a refresh."

Which suddenly strikes her as a fantastic idea, much as she doesn't like being continuously deflected. Because she glances down at herself and her own smell serves as a reminder: maybe she bathed last night - _was_ bathed - but a sponge bath isn't a shower, and her clothes are a filthy, sooty wreck, torn in more than a few places, and they reek of smoke. She's probably been getting looks from everyone who catches sight of her and she merely hasn't noticed.

"Yeah. Alright." It's the kind of place where you pay at the front. She starts to push herself up, fishing in her jacket for her wallet - by some miracle she didn't lose it - but he shakes his head.

"I got it."

Oh, _really._ She arches a brow. "I can get myself. I got a _job_."

"Yeah, but." He sits back and bites at his lip. "Beth…"

She slides out of the booth and stands, crosses her arms. "Daryl Dixon, are you seriously gonna fight me over the goddamn check?"

He stares up at her for another few seconds, then huffs a laugh, shakes his head again, maneuvers himself up with another grunt. "No, ma'am."

"Ma'am." She tosses him a quick grin over her shoulder as she starts toward the cash register. "I kinda like that."

He actually reaches up and gives her ponytail a tug, and something hanging over them falls away, leaving only clear air behind, like a harbinger of the breeze waiting for them back on the bike. "Yeah, no. That ain't happenin'."

"Will if I want it to."

Sigh. "Yes, ma'am."


	36. take me down into your paradise

**Chapter 36: take me down into your paradise**

Her apartment is something else she only saw a couple days ago. Less, maybe; she's still not completely sure how that all works out and she's just about ready to give up trying to get it straight. But regardless, when they pull up to the curb and she turns and looks at the thrift store's cluttered front window, at the scratched, flaking door, up at her own narrow, barred window, it feels like a place she's returning to after years away.

She can't decide whether or not she's actually happy to be back.

She's climbing off the bike before he cuts the engine, stretching and glancing around. They're here in significant part to redo whatever magical protection he provided her, which means she might _need_ it, but nothing seems out of the ordinary. The same packs of kids periodically slouching down the street - school apparently being optional - and the same idle passers-by, shoppers and wanderers of all ages, an elderly woman she recognizes coming out of the store and giving her exactly the kind of look she's sure her appearance and her company deserve.

And Daryl behind her - how his presence always has weight now even when he isn't touching her.

Sometimes especially when he's not.

She steps toward her door, glances back at him with a faint smile. "Sigils?"

"Yeah." He moves past her, trail of his fingertips across her forearm as he does - might be accidental, and she knows it's not, and a sweet little shiver runs through her. She watches - and then follows - as he reaches the pavement in front of the door, and crouches over the gum-spotted pavement, heedless of how he looks.

He could be searching for something he dropped. It's not that weird.

So what the hell. She crouches beside him.

It would have been easy for her to miss; that's almost certainly intentional. It's very much like what she saw at the gas station, but not exactly identical: a series of intersecting lines and curves and squiggles roughly the size of her palm, done in what looks like gray chalk - though it can't be, because if it was it would surely be gone by now. Nevertheless it's faded. She didn't see it when it was fresh but she can tell; it's fuzzy around the edges, some of the squiggles and a couple of the lines mostly gone.

Daryl is gazing down at it with deep concentration, brow furrowed as if he's trying to puzzle something out. Beth tilts her head.

"Somethin' wrong?"

"Nah." He extends a hand, presses a fingertip to the center of the thing. "Just gotta make it stronger this time. If I can." He closes his eyes and takes a breath. Immediately a very slight hum buzzes across her skin, like a wave of electricity, and she remembers the farm and how he opened the Night Gate with her knife. Similar to what he's now doing with his fingertip, complicated swoops and swirls and hard slashes. His hand is almost dancing, and it makes her dizzy to follow it. It leaves faintly glowing lines in its wake, somewhere between white and gold, and she sees that he's subtly altering the design, extending a line here, sharpening a curve there, adding a dash at a couple of points.

 _Stronger._

She drags her gaze away from his finger and up to his face; his eyes are still shut tight and his lips are moving silently, forming words she's certain aren't English. _Reord a Bealu._ There's something hypnotic about that too, and she pulls in a slow breath as that buzz flows down through her and settles between her thighs, transfigured to warmth.

She's not even sure it's about sex. Or not just. Because her clit isn't the only thing warm and tingling. Her own fingertips are, too.

With potential. With what she might _do_.

It's over so suddenly it makes her gasp, makes her wobble on her heels, and he catches her with a steadying hand on her shoulder, peering into her face.

"Y'alright?"

"Yeah." Another breath, a little shaky. "Yeah. It's just… I felt it."

He looks at her for a moment, clearly thoughtful, then nods and touches her shoulder again. "C'mon. Gotta do the one inside."

She's returning the nod, preparing to push to her feet, when there's a jingle a few feet away and the store's door swings open, revealing a familiar pair of battered brown loafers. Those rise into worn grandma jeans and a loose purple t-shirt, all of which clothe an elderly woman with close-cropped gray hair and light brown skin. She arches a brow at them and crosses her arms.

"Beth? What're you doin' down there, honey?"

"Mrs. Lorris." Beth shoots Daryl a look as she rises; his expression is questioning, and a bit apprehensive. Not without reason. She's thought with a degree of amusement how he might look to her landlady, this considerably older man going into or coming out of the apartment, but in fact she should probably have been feeling her own apprehension. Mrs. Lorris is nice enough, but Beth has also always gotten the sense that she's fairly _traditional._

She doubts she's going to get evicted over screwing a man twice her age. Nevertheless.

"Lookin' for a ring." She can lie very well. Always could. Prior to her world ending, you never would have looked at Beth Greene's sweet, innocent, unmarked face and thought she could lie her ass off, but she could, and she's only gotten better at it since the innocence in her burned to death. "Nothin' important. Not valuable or anythin'. Just slipped off my finger." She shrugs, affecting unconcern. "Can't find it."

"Mm." The woman looks doubtful, which Beth ignores. Trying too hard to convince is a dead giveaway. Anyway, she has another thing to worry about. She inclines her head at Daryl. "This is Daryl. He's helpin' me out with some stuff about my family."

Vague. Just vague enough to be flexible. The suspicion is beginning to fade out of Mrs. Lorris's face. Though Beth would be surprised if she ended up even close to fully convinced. "Everything okay?"

"Fine. Just workin' on trackin' a few things down." She gives the woman a small smile. "He's real good at trackin'."

Daryl clears his throat, says nothing. _Smart man._

"Alright." Mrs. Lorris hesitates, studies her more closely. "You're a mess, honey."

Beth doesn't have to fake being awkward. She shrugs again. "Yeah. Was gonna go take care of that now. Got work later."

"Alright," Mrs. Lorris repeats, starts to turn to the door, looks back. "You be careful, hear? I never think that job's safe for you. Wish you had somethin' else, if I'm bein' honest."

Beth smiles again. Polite. It's not as if the woman is even _wrong_ ; her job has never been safe and at this point it's likely even less so. "I will. Promise."

Mrs. Lorris gives her a final farewell nod and vanishes into the dimness of the shop, leaving a mothball-scented puff of air behind as the door swings closed.

"Landlady," Beth says, turning back to Daryl in time to see comprehension cross his features. Comprehension… and something else. Something uncomfortable. Something like the edge of a frown.

"You lied about me," he says quietly. Not angry. Not surprised. He doesn't even sound overtly upset.

But he doesn't exactly sound happy.

 _Shit._

"She's… older. Y'know. She has this way of lookin' at things." Very awkward. To herself, she sounds far too much like she's making an excuse, and not a terribly good one. "And you're…"

He cocks his head. A wolf, questioning. She knows he won't get mad at her. That's not what she's worried about. What he might think she's about to say: that he looks like he hangs out in a lot of biker bars, and not nice ones. That he doesn't look like someone a _nice girl_ \- even only kind of - should be spending her time with. And that's true. But.

"You're older too," she says, just as quiet, and swallows.

He simply stares at her, face unreadable.

It's the first time this has come up in this way, she realizes. First time it's been a thing. She hasn't been consistently aware of it; if anything she's been forgetting it constantly. He doesn't feel any older than her at all. In fact, since she met him she hasn't really thought of him as _any_ particular age. But now there's what someone else would see. The conclusions they might draw.

It's not that she gives a fuck. Unless she has to.

"I don't care," she adds. "I never have. But she would."

He ducks his head, eyes lowered. She now recognizes this for what it is: submission, to her decision and to the way she's approaching what she obviously perceives as a problem. But that doesn't make it any more comfortable, and she sighs, reaches down and takes his hand.

It is what it is, and right now there's only so much she can do about anything.

"C'mon. Let's go upstairs."

* * *

The stairwell is thick with shadows, and it seems to her that in fact it's more so than usual, though the place has never exactly been well-lit. It's unsettling, but far less than it would be if she was alone. Instead she merely feels her senses flipping into high alert, and when she glances back and down at Daryl she can't detect any overt concern in his darkened eyes.

All the same, his nostrils flare.

She pauses, still looking at him. "Anythin'?"

He shakes his head, lifts a shoulder. "Sigil expired. Other'n that? Nah. Think somethin' might've been here, but if it was, 's long gone now."

She blinks at him. " _Somethin' might've been here?_ You don't seem too worried."

"No point. I'm not sure, and even if I was, can't do nothin' about it now." He moves up beside her, then past. " _Somethin'_ don't have to mean Ytend. I don't think it was. Don't have the _stink_. And it don't have to mean they were lookin' for you, anyhow. Plenty of things just wander."

"That doesn't make me feel a whole lot better." But it does. A bit.

"New ward'll keep most of em' away."

She follows him up the stairs to the landing. Again he crouches, swift, and this time he doesn't hesitate. His fingertip follows the same gliding, swooping lines and curves from before, and it seems to go quicker. She half watches him and half scans the shadows, and while the same warm buzz fills her, it's not as intense. She suspects that it's not so much a drop in the intensity of the magic itself as it is her simply getting used to it.

One thing she can say for herself in all of this: she's consistently adjusted quickly.

"Alright." He straightens up, shaking his hand as if something pinched it. "Should do you for now. I oughta redo it in a couple days, though. Stronger ones run out faster."

"Fine." She's not exactly impatient, but she's not far from it. All at once she feels the full weight of her dirty clothes, the sweat and smoke lingering on her skin and in her hair, and all she wants to do in this world or any other is shower and change and then maybe collapse into bed for an hour or so. She doesn't have to be at work until three. Her phone is fucked, but by her internal clock she reckons it's a little after noon.

She fumbles out her key, pushes the door open, steps inside with a deep sigh.

The stairwell was shadowy, but her room looks totally unchanged, precisely how she left it - down to the towel tossed over the back of the sofa. The towel he wrapped around her when he scooped her up and carried her to the bed. After he went down on his knees in the shower, gave her his lips and his tongue.

Drank her like the water.

A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth, and she half turns as he pulls the door shut behind them, shrugging off her jacket. "I'm gonna take a shower."

He nods, scanning the room, but his focus snaps onto her when she touches the back of his hand. "You wanna come?"

 _Phrasing._

The smile that breaks across his face mirrors hers, immediate and uncontrolled, and his jacket joins hers on the back of the couch as she leads him to the bathroom.

* * *

He was hesitant to be touched by her, as least as a human. He seemed nervous. Even embarrassed. She thinks she might understand that a little better now that she understands some of the source of his shame, but it also doesn't _matter;_ he yanks himself out of his clothes just as fast and just as clumsily as she does, trying to kiss her at the same time. Trying so hard not to stop. There's nothing slow about this, but it also doesn't have the thick desperation of last night. It's _lighter_ somehow, and as she stumbles into him and their teeth collide, he laughs and so does she, warm and full.

This is what it could be like. If they could. If they _did_. She's certain. It could be like this all the time.

" _Shit,_ Beth." Panting bleeding into a groan as she reaches between his legs and takes hold of him, strokes him, presses him against her lower belly and smears precome across her skin. She loves how he feels when he's in fierd, how thick and heavy and _big_ he is, but this is so wonderful too, because he _fits_ in her hand, nestled into her palm and twitching when she squeezes him around the base. He fumbles at her, her upper arm and her hip, and as she stretches her arm around him to cut the water on, he lowers his head and closes his teeth on the juncture of her throat and shoulder, bites gently and holds on.

She never thought she would want to be _claimed._

She never imagined it could be so much _fun._

She draws him in under the water and backs herself against the cold tile, hisses, laughs, kisses him again. Kisses him _deep,_ sucks at his tongue and his lips - that talented fucking tongue and those lips - moans into his mouth when he pins her harder with his body and his hand wriggles between them and between her legs, finds her clit and presses it into an unhurried circle.

Again, the image of wrapping her legs around his waist as he cups his hands under her ass and plunges into her, so raw and so vivid it shoves the breath out of her. She's still trying to handle him but it's increasingly difficult, increasingly just about _impossible_ , and she's relegated to simply gripping him as he slides his fingers from her clit down to her lips and nudges them apart, slips inside her in a single easy slide.

It's not getting fucked up against the wall, it's not his cock pounding into her, but it's so fucking _good_ how he's in her like this. She holds onto him by his cock and by her arm hooked around his neck as he fucks her with one finger and then two, stretching her open with the kind of ease she never would have associated with the word _virgin_ , and she groans and curses his name and whispers _fuck, I love you_ , _Daryl._

 _I love you._

He grins against her jaw - toothy and lupine, incisors so delightfully sharp when he nips her - and fucks her harder.

There's nothing desperate about this but there _is,_ because she wants to come. She wants to come so fucking _much._ Wants that, spreads her legs as wide as she can without falling, drops her head back against the tile with an impact she barely feels and sobs as he hooks his fingers against her upper wall and rubs at her clit with the edge of his thumb. She doesn't have to tell him how to do it - she never really did after that first night - and it hits her all over again that he can do what feels best for her because _he can feel it too._ Which is why his heavy panting is tightening as the muscles of her pussy tighten, why he's trembling as hard as she is and half fucking into her fist-

And she knows what she wants to do for him.

"Don't come," she breathes. "Don't come yet, don't- Oh my _God,_ oh God oh _Daryl-_ " Breaking his name off into ragged sobs as she bucks against him, waves of it crashing through her and washed away by the water streaming over her like hundreds of tiny fingertips. And his whisper hot in her ear, a blur of languages.

 _Lufiend. Christ, magden… So fuckin'_ sweet.

He catches her when she slumps against him, arm around her, and she drops her head against his slick chest and shudders until it's over. Until it's gone.

It nearly flies right past her attention when he starts to wash her, because he does it so softly, so slowly, and at first she thinks he's just combing his fingers through her hair until she smells the shampoo. Then she smiles giddily, melts even further into him and allows him to shift her how he wants her, rinsing her hair with slow passes of his hands and bending to fumble for the soap - and he chuckles when her weight almost makes him slip.

"Gonna get me killed, girl."

Wouldn't that be blackly hilarious. Everything they've come through - a _fuck_ of a lot in a couple of weeks - and it all ending with a fall in the shower _._ She smiles again, grazes her teeth across his collarbone and soaks the satisfaction in like the water when his breath hitches into a shiver.

He's still so hard against her. Nudging her hip, her belly. He obeyed her and didn't take his release when she took hers. She's not surprised by it anymore. But she hasn't been surprised by it for a while now. And being afraid of it - this power over him - is only a memory.

He seems to take so much joy in it. That's enough for her.

But that doesn't mean she's only going to take.

"Let me," she says softly, placing her hands flat on his chest as the last of the soap streams down her skin. Like she might be about to push him - but she raises her head and looks at him, and he stares back at her, his eyes deep, and as clear as the water running off the ends of his hair.

He's not afraid either. A little flicker of nervousness, maybe. But only that much.

"You want to," he whispers, and it's not a question. His strong hands frame her hips and she rolls herself forward, rubbing slowly against him until his eyes flutter closed and a low groan vibrates under her spread palms.

"I want to."

He nods, and she does.

It's more difficult with their difference in heights but she manages it, reaching up to work the shampoo through his tangled strands, massaging his scalp until his head is drooping and a growl is emanating from deep in his throat, a sound far more like a purr. It flows into her through the ears and vibrates under her skin as she begins to move her hands over him, mapping his many scars with her slippery fingertips.

Remembering how he was, when she first wanted to do this. The intensity with which he _hadn't_ wanted it.

But now he's merely standing there, relaxed and open, letting her do whatever she wants with him.

She could ask him, she thinks as she glides her hands down his sides to his hips, swiping her thumbs in a long curve just above his pubic hair and sending another shiver through him. She has an idea now, but she could ask straight out, and she knows he would answer. But his face is so peaceful - except for the tight edges where his climax has been denied, or at least delayed - and she can't bear to.

Not now. Later.

They're doing that with a lot of things. Sooner or later there won't _be_ a later anymore.

 _Whatever._ She keeps moving, closing a soapy hand around his shaft and drawing a helpless moan from what seems like the absolute core of him as he rocks into her fist. He's so hot, so smooth, the exposed head such a wonderful glistening pink. Almost feminine somehow.

Her mouth waters. But no. This isn't the right place. Among other things she might fucking drown. Maybe he could manage it, but he can manage things that would make her curl up in a ball and cry.

That have done, actually.

"Turn," she says quietly, and here he does hesitate. Only for a second, but to her it seems to stretch out and out. And while she _saw_ some of how bad it was, _felt_ it, part of her is very gently out of patience with him.

She loves him. This isn't something he should fear to show her, wherever that fear is coming from.

"C'mon." And she pulls her hand back slightly, swings it forward and lands a slap on his ass that sounds harder than it is, ricocheting off the tile.

He jerks his head around at her, eyes wide. For the briefest of moments _she_ hesitates, wonders if _this_ might be finally too much… But when he ducks his head and turns his back to her, she catches a strange, wondering little smile curling the corner of his mouth.

This also comes out before she really knows it will, and it's bizarre in every way she can imagine - which means it fits perfectly - but it still knocks the breath out of her. It's very low, coming out on that exhale of impact, and when she says it and runs her hands up to his shoulders, he whimpers.

"Good boy."

 _Oh._

Maybe it shouldn't feel as natural as it does. That said, if he had a tail right now she's utterly fucking certain that he would be wagging it.

He braces his hands flat on the tile and she begins to work on his back.

She's not going to rush. She can tell immediately that this is difficult for him, being touched this way - or at least that it's not exactly comfortable. He tenses and releases in shallow waves, bearing up under her but having to make himself do it. She knows she's not hurting him as she traces the cruel slashes crisscrossing over his skin, but someone else - someone who should have loved him and protected him - hurt him here, hurt him so bad, and she doubts that kind of pain ever fully disappears with time. She traces those lines and she's tracing the lines of a memory literally beaten into his flesh.

She kisses the knobs of his spine between his shoulderblades and he reaches back, lays a hand over her hip, sighs.

She understands a little. She doesn't understand enough.

The final streaks of soap are circling the drain. She slides her arms around his waist and kisses his spine again, just beneath the nape of his neck, and thinks about how he bit her there and held her in place, and how inexplicably safe it made her feel.

"Let's get out."

He nods, reaches forward to cut off the water. As he turns halfway back to her, pushing the curtain aside and retrieving a towel, she sees he's still hard - swollen and shining, dark, has to be aching with it - and wants to take his cock in her hand and say it again.

 _Good boy._

She's not quite there. Yet.

He hands her the towel and stands there, dripping, as she regards him with an arched brow. "What about you?"

He shrugs. "Can only see the one."

There are others in one of the dresser drawers, but she's not inclined to worry to that point. She quickly dries - inadequately - and hands the towel to him. By now he's gotten it and he does the same, tosses the towel back onto the hook on the back of the door, and looks questioningly at her.

She takes his damp hand with her own and steps out of the tub. "C'mon."

She knows it must be obvious that she's Planning Something as she leads him back into the main room and toward the bed, and she feels a not-insignificant amount of glee about it. There's no big secret here. She has plans for him and she wants him to know it. He'll find out what they are soon enough.

He stops beside the bed when she does, and when she turns to face him he's gazing at her with the barred early afternoon light pouring all over him, warming him and making his damp skin shine and his eyes glow a wolflike blue, and even without his size and his strength and his fur and claws and teeth he's still the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.

And he has no idea.

He was told that he was worthless for so long. Like the wounds the scars became, that doesn't ever vanish. And she can't heal them for him, just like she can't heal herself.

But she can do other things.

She takes both his hands and maneuvers him against the bed and then onto it, pushing him back against the pillows as she follows on her hands and knees. He props himself up on his elbows, bemused, then his eyes widen in realization as she lifts his legs apart and settles herself between them.

"Beth…"

She looks up at him, swallows, curls her hand around his base. She needs to be very, _very_ clear about this.

"I want to."

He merely stares at her for another moment, mouth slightly open. But he's not confounded. He's not stunned. There's no surprise, and not only because technically she's already _done_ this.

It goes deeper than that.

He's jutting up from her fist, twitching now and then, muscles flexing. His foreskin has pulled far back and far down and she can see the head with perfect clarity, how smooth and wet it looks, the tiny slit at the tip, the vein snaking up the underside of his shaft. She saw him this close on the beach, she supposed, but that wasn't the same. That felt and still does feel like a dream. This is piercingly real, and when she leans in and licks delicately at the head - precome salty-sweet on her tongue - it crackles into her belly like a ball of lightning.

She looks back up at him. His hands are both fisted into the sheet, his face pulled into something like a grimace. He shouldn't be, for just about every conceivable reason, but he looks _scared._

His eyes are screwed shut but he must be able to feel her gaze on him, because he opens them and gulps air. "Beth, you don't have t-"

"Jesus, of course I don't." _Idiot._ She gives his legs a rough shove. "Sit up more. I want you to see."

Another whimper and he's finally moving, groping clumsily for the pillows and setting them against the wall that serves as her headboard. Even then he doesn't seem to know what to do with his hands, and they clench the sheet, clutch at each other, make abortive little grabs for hers. Again what fills her is something the smallest bit like impatience, and she reaches up with one hand and threads her fingers with his.

She kisses his cock, flutters her tongue against the underside right beneath the head, and he curses and drops his head back with a _thunk_.

She's not a _pro_. She knows that. One session of licking a werewolf's dick like an ice cream cone until he came all over her hands and face doesn't count as extensive experience. Some people might not even call it experience. At least not _that_ kind of experience.

 _Well, fuck them._

She's getting it now, anyway.

More exploration with her tongue, running it all over the length of him. Licking him everywhere. Carefully tonguing his balls into her mouth and swirling across them. Stroking everything with her fingers, her hands. Flicking her tongue against his slit and pressing with the tip. Opening to him and sliding her lips down, stretching them tight around him and hollowing her cheeks as she sucks gently, taking him so deep she feels him barely graze the back of her throat. Feeling him flex inside and under her as she does these things. It's extraordinary. It feels like nothing else she's ever done - the weight of him, the _density_ , the smoothness and the smell. The salty-bitter taste with those edges of mild sweetness. The way he seems to _fit_ her mouth, as if somehow it _was_ made - in part - to do this very thing.

She keeps waiting to dislike something and it's not happening.

She's so wrapped up in him that other sensory input has completely faded into the background but now it comes roaring back in - his fingers combed into her hair as he cups the back of her head with both hands, not pushing but just _feeling_ her, and his thick, ragged moans interspersed with fragments of words the language of which she can't determine. She raises her eyes, not missing a beat in the bobbing rhythm of her sucking, once more holding him by the base, and what she sees on his face is something completely new. Or maybe not _completely;_ he looked a little like this on the beach. But that was with the face of a wolf, and now he's staring at her with his lips parted and wet and an expression almost like pain twisting his features. Pain and disbelief. And awe. It's plain how much of an effort keeping his eyes open is taking, but of course he's refusing to close them; she said she wanted him to see so he'll _see._

And it occurs to her all over again that she's not the only one here who has never done this. Never had it done to them.

"Beth," he gasps as his eyes lock onto hers, and suddenly he bares his teeth, every muscle in his neck and chest and arms tensing up at once. "I'm gonna… Oh, _fuck,_ please, please, I-"

Takes her a second to get it, what he's asking. Why he needs to ask. She told him not to; he needs to know that the command is no longer in effect. Heat floods her but she doesn't stop. She nods, gives him a rough _mmhmm_ sound, and he whines and clenches his hands in her hair, hips jerking upward in a hard spasm. " _Shit,_ Beth, fuckin' hell, you're gonna make me _come,_ you're gonnaaa-"

The last vowel stretches and warps into a broken shout as he bucks into her mouth, makes her gag on him until her eyes water, and she doesn't give a fuck; she keeps sucking, brings him through, swallows the thick salty fluid when it bursts onto her tongue. It's the same, the exact same taste, and it's like a dawn sky breaks open behind her eyelids, his hands and the heat of his skin and how _strong_ she feels like this, and how it's nothing like those fucking porn mags she ruined so many hours staring at behind that fucking counter on that fucking stool.

He's flowing into her. She's taking him, flowing back into him. Not coming, not like he does, but it swells in her belly and surges so bright up through her, and she's certain that if she opens her eyes the light will be beaming out through her skin.

Through theirs.

His fingers slip free from her hair and fumble weakly at her, and she reaches up and once more weaves hers with his as she lowers her head to rest on his thigh, wet swollen lips against his softening cock and the thunder of his pulse filling her.

"I love you," he whispers, and she knows he doesn't think the words are enough. But they're good.

 _I belong to you._


	37. the saints can't help me now

**Chapter 37: the saints can't help me now, the ropes have been unbound**

She's not sure when exactly it happens, but when she opens her eyes she's tucked against his side with her hand on his chest and her head on his shoulder, and he's breathing deep with an arm curled around her, face turned toward hers. Sleeping, it looks like. Though as she blinks at him and shifts her leg against his, fingers stroking upward and tracing his collarbone, she knows he's not.

Warm light, still early afternoon. She doesn't have to leave yet. Neither does he.

She ducks her head and kisses the knob of bone at the top of his shoulder, and he murmurs something, eyelids fluttering open. He gazes at her, blue and bright, and turns enough to allow himself to lift his other hand and tangle his fingers back into her hair.

He wants to say something. She can sense it beating against the inside of his throat, his head, trying to break loose like a trapped bird. But he can't. He shakes his head very slightly. And she doesn't have to ask why.

He doesn't like to say things unless he thinks they're _right._

"I liked that," she breathes, closing her hand around his wrist. "Doin' that. I liked it a lot."

His smile is small and unrestrained and deeply awkward, and he flicks his eyes away, abruptly refusing to meet hers. He murmurs something, and she can only guess at the words.

 _Dreogan ic cweman thu?_

She nuzzles him, presses in closer. "Mm?"

He swallows, clearly still unable to meet her gaze, and the words are barely more audible. But she hears them, and once again that warm brightness flares in her belly. It's nothing to do with fucking him. It's not that at all.

" _Did I please you?_ "

" _Oh_." She sighs, cups his cheek and tips his forehead down to hers. Nods. She doesn't know what else to do. But somehow she doubts he needs more than that.

His needs really are very simple.

"Yeah. You did."

A shiver rolls through him - identical to that first one she truly noticed on the porch of the farmhouse under that Scead night sky. When she first realized that she had this power, to make him happy this way. She was scared then. Terrified, of what it meant. Like someone had just handed her a weapon with an uncertain trigger, something she might fire without meaning to.

She wasn't stupid. But she was wrong.

"I don't wanna leave," he whispers, and smiles again, shaky. "I don't wanna go anywhere. Fuck, I just wanna stay here."

"I wish we could." As if she would need to say it. She rolls even closer to him, pressed all along his side and slinging a leg high across his thigh, just about hooked over his hip. He's not hard, but she knows without having to give it a second's consideration - with a flush of wicked satisfaction - that if he was, she would be able to grind herself against him in a way basically guaranteed to drive him insane.

She ghosts her lips across his, and he moans softly and she grins and nips at him.

Grins, sure. But behind it, something darker and heavier is starting to weigh her down. She gropes at it, trying to get a grip on its shape, because there are any number of things it could be, but he solidifies it for her by extending his hand and, with exquisite care and a little nervousness in the tremble of his arm, takes hold of her left wrist and turns it, veins up.

She knows why. Just because he's essentially her _slave_ \- even her enthusiastically willing one - that doesn't mean he has no understanding of give-and-take. It doesn't mean he has no expectations.

She would probably do well to remember that.

She bathed him. Touched him, touched him in places that clearly drained him. He surrendered to her, and not because he had to do it. He was afraid, even if most of his fear had faded, but he _wanted_ to. She hasn't missed the relief beneath the tension. Now he feels loose, boneless to his core, as if his body has been waiting for years to have this lifted from it.

Now he turns her wrist into the warm light and gazes at it, the delicate pale blue of her veins, the almost invisible wrinkles just beneath the heel of her palm, the bone curving the side… And the thin scar slashing across those branching rivers of blood.

He doesn't have to ask. He's about to, lips parting as his head ducks slightly and his eyes drop, but she doesn't give him a chance.

"I tried to kill myself."

No sense in mincing words. His eyes widen - but she's not sure she detects much in the way of real surprise. He's silent, lying there partway beneath her, cradling her wrist in his thick, powerful hand in a way that somehow manages to convey to her that he's being so careful, though he knows at the same time that she doesn't need it. Not from him. She's not fragile. He won't break her.

"A few months after the fire. No one fuckin' believed me. I was tryin' to tell people, they all said I was just _traumatized,_ and after a while I couldn't take the way they looked at me. Bastards." No particular heat. Everything she feels here went cold a long damn time ago. "Kids at school. Doctors. My _aunt and uncle._ They were never gonna believe me. Never. And at night I just kept seein' it happen, over and over. So it just didn't…"

She shakes her head. "Finally didn't seem like it was worth it anymore. I was sick of it. I wanted to be done. So."

"But you didn't," he says, voice rough and low. Gentle.

"No. I didn't. I did part of one, and I decided I didn't wanna finish it right before my aunt came in the bathroom and found me." She grimaces. Still very cold. "So I went back in the hospital for a week or so. They got me a new doctor. Some _great_ new drugs. Made me feel like a fuckin' zombie. But I took 'em. Least for a while. I wanted to live."

She stares at him - his narrow, crystalline blue eyes, wolf's face hiding behind the man, and the way he's holding her now…

It's like him. Like she was waiting for him to do that. Waiting to be able to let him.

"I wanted to live so I could hunt down the things that did it to us. I wanted to live so I could understand it. So I could kill 'em all."

He nods. But what flickers across his face is sad, and uncertainly so, and his jaw works as if he wants to say something and isn't sure he should. Isn't sure he can. But he pushes onward, and he does.

"Got part of that, anyway."

"What part?"

"You understand. You get why it happened."

"I guess I do." She tugs her wrist free, nothing forceful in the movement, and he releases her almost before she begins to do so. She gets some of it. She suspects there's a lot more that she'll never fully grasp, but at this point she's prepared to satisfy herself with what she has.

Especially since it seems they now have bigger problems.

She turns away from him and onto her side, facing the window with her arm crooked under her head and his body long and solid at her back. Her eyes unfocus until the room is a pale yellow blur, far more cheerful and more comfortable than it actually is. "I'm never gonna be able to kill 'em all."

He doesn't answer. She hears him moving behind her, feels his knees pressing into the backs of hers, one leg between her calves as his hand settles on her hip. Somehow, almost entirely without her noticing it, being in bed with him like this started feeling completely natural. She fits with him, finds comfortable places without needing to try. He responds to her own changes in position, accommodates her and himself. Maybe it's just Scyld. Maybe it's also Heala.

Maybe it's neither.

"We kill as many as we can," he says finally, breath warm at the nape of her neck. "You can help us."

Except for hunters. Except for towers and kings. Except for the end of the fucking world. "Ain't gonna be that simple now."

"No," he murmurs, and kisses her shoulder. "Never was."

"You're gonna have to mate with me," she says, very quiet. "Sooner or later. You're gonna have to."

Deeper silence.

Thicker. The traffic noise and occasional voices outside are abruptly muted, and the light seems to dim and lose some of its subtle color. Daryl's hand tightens on her hip as his body goes rigid, and she feels the points of claws lurking beneath the disguise of his blunt nails.

"Beth." Bloodless and hoarse, and nothing else.

"You're gonna have to." Finally she's saying it, and if he's fighting panic, it's only increasing her own calm. They've both been dodging this long enough. They can't anymore. Not after last night. Not after what almost happened, and what she found a way to give him. Give both of them. What she soothed won't stay soothed for long.

Maybe doing it really is that dangerous. Maybe it isn't. But she's certain that either way, it's not something that should just _happen._

"It could-"

"Hurt me? Yeah, so could walkin' outside right now. So could bein' here with you." She rolls onto her back and his hand moves with her, settling on her lower belly just above the tightly curled line of her pubic hair. "Every fuckin' second now, I think we're riskin' our lives. Every time we try to go after whatever this is. Every time we try to learn more. The Scead. The Benescead. The Library. Before that, when you _met_ me. It's all dangerous. Everythin'. Every goddamn breath."

She lowers her hand and covers his, small and warm cupped over his big scarred knuckles as she turns her head to look at him. Far from narrow, his eyes are wide, liquid, frightened and stricken - and hungry. Aching. More than any of those things. What's ultimately starving in him has nothing to do with fucking her and everything to do with what he said the thing itself is called.

 _Union of souls._

He's desperately incomplete. She's looking at someone in a state of partial existence. Waiting to be whole. For a few seconds she can't breathe.

"What're we fightin' for?"

"The world," he whispers, but she shakes her head.

"That's too easy. Any of you could be fightin' for the world. There's gotta be more. What's Rick fightin' for?"

"Us." Unhesitating, and utterly confident. "His wife. His kids."

"What about Carol?"

"She's got a kid too." His voice dips, traces the edge of faltering, and Beth wonders why. "Little girl."

"Does Michonne have a kid?"

He hesitates, and she knows she's not imagining the shadow falling across his face. She feels it, like the graze of a cool fingertip. "She… She did. Had a family. Gone now."

"Oh." Not exactly awkward, but she drops her own eyes from his and stares up at the white, water-spotted squares of the ceiling. There always _has_ been something about Michonne, from the first time Beth met her. Something dark. Knotted like scar tissue. She was never able to define it.

But it doesn't disprove the point.

"Y'all fight for family. That's what the cyne is, isn't it? It's not just a pack. It's a family. Family is what comes next. _Family_ is the world." She interweaves their fingers and squeezes, and realizes with a slow, flushed wave what his hand is really covering, and marvels at the fact that she's thinking along these lines at all. That she ever would.

She died. She got out of that fire, but she died. Something else stood up in her place. Here she is in bed with a werewolf, and she's thinking about the making of life.

"You told me you were all dyin' out 'cause you weren't havin' babies. Not… Not _Hathsta_ ones. You can kill all you want, but if you can't do that…"

"Beth." Abruptly he lifts himself over her, disentangles his hand from hers and cups her face with his paw of a hand. Braced above her like this, he looks totally wild, totally inhuman, and once again it's as though she can see his form blurring at the edges, stretching and trembling as it threatens to come apart and reveal what's beneath. "The fuck're you sayin'?"

 _I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying._ Suddenly she's afraid. Not of him - him nearly pinning her down this way is flooding her with calm, with the deep instinct that she's as safe as she can possibly be - but of everything beyond him. Where these words in her came from. Where they've been traveling together since she first saw him plunging out of the dark to do battle in her name like some kind of surreal knight errant.

"I lost my family," she breathes - and her breath is choked as tears well her eyes and trickle down to pool irritatingly in her ears. "I could fight for them, but they're dead. They're gone. I could kill a hundred thousand of those _things_ and it wouldn't bring Daddy back, or Mama, or Maggie or Shawn. In the end it'd just be me."

"It wouldn't just be you." He leans down, brow against hers. "Wouldn't ever just be you."

"So I can fight for you."

"Lufiend," he whispers. "Agendfra. Eower heorte sy min guthfana."

She doesn't need him to tell her. She should. A few of the words she knows, but a couple she doesn't, and the context normally wouldn't be enough to make her confident. But he says them and they enter her head and unravel themselves - or bring _her_ to _them_ \- and she understands.

 _Sweetheart. Mistress. Your heart is my battle-standard._

"Then sooner or later we can't fight this anymore." She combs her fingers into his hair, frames the sides of his head. Like she has before when he's been in fierd, his huge wolf's head and his muzzle, his tongue flicking against her mouth. "It doesn't have to be _now,_ I know… I know there's so much shit we still gotta do, and I gotta go to _work-_ " She laughs, sudden and incredulous and painful, gone as fast as it came. "But you know. You _know._ " She gazes up at him, eyes searching his face. "Don't you?"

He doesn't move back from her, doesn't lift himself. Like he did when she was in his lap, he does it right there with her practically in his arms, the sharp cracks as his bones break one after the other beneath his deforming and reforming skin, and she watches, still with that same awe she felt the first time she asked him to do this for her and he did, as the wolf comes into being above her.

Not because he's running from anything. Not because he's trying to distract her, or him. He crouches over her with his fur glossy in the sun, forepaws at either side of her shoulders and his thick neck bent as he peers into her face.

This is because he needs to be himself.

"Ic oncnawan." He closes his eyes. There's resignation in his voice and his face - but that's not all it is.

Not nearly all.

"Aliefe hwilthrag," he says softly. "Hwon. Besece."

Again, somehow the words make their way into her - the vowels and the consonants, the forms, the _feel_ and the sense she knows is there, and she meets that sense and cradles them in her hands, watching the light glint off them like the strands of his fur.

 _I know._

 _Give me time. A little. Please._

She reaches up and again she does what she's come to love doing and frames his face with her hands, her thumbs stroking the place where his head lengthens into his muzzle. A low rumble makes its way from his chest into his throat and she leans up to kiss the cool, wet end of his noise, the seam of his lips, the scruffier fur at his chin.

The truth is that he wouldn't have needed to ask for time. She doesn't want to do this now. She _does,_ and she's wanted to do it since that first night with her fingers working in her pussy and her ass in the air, but every instinct she has - and apparently she has some she wasn't previously aware of - is telling her that it isn't time yet. Something isn't right.

Something is different now. It's about last night. He _does_ understand. So does she.

So this isn't a thing to fear.

He's smiling when he raises his head, that slight curve of his lips that makes his face look so perfectly caught between human and animal, and glides the tips of his claws down her side. Like always, the scratch sends wonderful little sparks dancing through her nerves and she arches and breathes a laugh, her hands curving over the thick muscles of his forearms. She spreads her legs without a second's hesitation when he slides his knee between them and laughs again, rolls her hips up to chase the pressure he won't _quite_ give her.

Naturally he wasn't done with her after the shower. No way. And it's not like she wants to fight him on it.

They've got time. She can give them both that much.

She parts her lips when he licks at her and licks back, nips at him, captures his tongue and sucks at it before he's tugging himself free and flicking a line down her throat to her collarbones. The air cools the wet trail he leaves behind and she feels herself unfurling under it, under _him,_ the way he's pinning her down with his mouth alone. Where he's headed isn't exactly a puzzle, and a sigh that's close to another laugh rolls out of her as she strokes her fingers through the thicker fur of his shoulders.

Warm. Strong. Soft. Somehow it's the softness she keeps coming back to, and maybe it's because beneath the softness is the way she's never really felt afraid with him, not _really_ \- naked and laid out under a monster that could kill her with a casual flex of a muscle, and once more as safe as she can ever remember feeling.

And he's so beautiful like this. Shining mound of his back as he bends to travel lower, circling her nipples with rapid swirls of his tongue, the polished gleam of his teeth, curved claws at her hips. She pushes up on her elbows to watch him, her breath coming in hard pulls, and when he reaches her lower belly and the muscles there flutter, she moans and lolls her head back between her shoulders.

Sunlight glowing red against her closed eyelids. Gleeful scream of a kid outside, thump of bass as a car passes below. And his growl and her groan intertwining as he grips her by the hips and angles her body upward and licks in a hot, firm swipe from the crack of her ass to her clit.

On the beach he practically assaulted her. They were both desperate, and giddy and exhausted and half insane with the madness they'd been plunged into. Now he's unhurried, and he settles onto his belly and cups her ass with both paws, claws digging wonderfully into the small of her back. He gives her more of those long, slow licks, faster flicks over her clit only to slide back down into that slow, steady pace, and she gropes for his ears and the top of his head and keens at the ceiling. There's one thing she wants and he's very purposefully not giving it to her, and she could demand it. She did before, and he obeyed.

Not this time. This time he gets there on his own.

More noises are blending and blurring - the fragments of his name escaping her lips, more of that heady bass, creak of her bedframe and mattress as they bow under his weight, and then his name collapsing into _please, God, Daryl, please do it, please,_ and his low, rough laugh and the slurp ringing off the walls as he enters her with his tongue.

She felt it, on the beach. But she _didn't,_ not really. Again, she was too desperate, too frantic with wanting him in her any way she could get him, and now she goes loose, hands falling to her sides, and the sound that rises from her is one she's never heard from herself before. It's caught between a sigh and a broken wail, and he's _filling_ her, flexing inside her, slipping back and pushing in again and somehow pressing into her from every side. Soft and slick and his breath searing her inner thighs, teeth digging into her mound and her belly, and in a brilliant burst she sees herself from the outside and it looks like he's eating her alive.

If - _when, when_ \- he mates with her, it'll be more than this. She's sure. But what remains of her brain can't even _begin_ to imagine something better than this, can't begin to imagine feeling more _full_ , more _claimed._

Loved.

She's already riding so high that she barely notices when she starts to come. It's simply another level. It washes in and then drowns her, pummels her from the bones out and keeps going and _going_ , and gazing up at the ceiling all she can see is a churning ocean of light. Something she could almost fall through. He could take her. They could go there together. Then she hears his muffled cry and the bedframe rattles like an earthquake and she knows they are.

Together.

 _Beautiful._

* * *

Too hot.

She's heavy and sticky, sweat coating her skin like it's the middle of summer, and she huffs a laugh as she rolls out of his furry arms and away, groping on the bedside table for the cell phone she realizes a split second later is gone forever.

 _Shit._

She has no idea what time it is anymore. No idea how much later. She knew they _had_ time, but not all the time ever, and she shoves herself up and scrubs at her face, groaning when her legs and hips and _everything_ aches. Her inner thighs are tacky with her own juices, more sweat making her itch, and she drags her hair over one shoulder and she turns at the waist to look back at him.

He's lying on his side, lazy and sprawled as much as the space will allow, eyes half closed and the fur on his belly matted with his own come, his tail slung over one hind leg. She hasn't paid much attention to it, she realizes, and it's sleek and luxuriant, and all she wants to do is fall into him and bury her face in it.

She has to get the fuck up.

He rumbles sleepily - protestingly - and makes a halfhearted grab for her, but she's already on her feet, arching her back and groaning again. "We gotta get outta here."

She's rooting in her dresser for a clean pair of jeans when she hears his own groan and the series of cracks that signal his change. "Quit your fuckin' job."

"And pay rent with what? My smile?" She drags her jeans up, hopping them over her hips. "My ass?"

"Move in with me."

"I like your place. I don't like it that much." And she does. She does like it, a lot. More than she might have expected. How its strangeness is far more welcoming to her now than it was, how being there is like entering a night totally apart from the rest of the city. How it feels to be in his den with him, how being in that room is somehow - very weirdly - a little like being in his arms. She likes it. But it's not _hers._

And he knows that.

She's hooking her bra and reaching for a shirt when he encircles her from behind, pulls her against him and nips at her ear. She squeaks, squirms, and relaxes when he presses his lips slowly to the edge of her cheekbone just beneath her temple.

Close to her scar.

"I wanna stay with you," he whispers. "I don't ever wanna leave."

He's not talking about the apartment.

She takes a slow breath and covers his hands with her own, closes her eyes. Now she's certain: at some point back there they fought past all the bullshit and all the barriers and reached a decision. Not now. Not yet. But this is unavoidable. This is going to happen.

So there's no sense in being afraid of it anymore.

"So don't." She leans into him, cranes her neck and nuzzles at his jaw. As always, washed through by how warm he is. How strong. That smell still lingering around him, one of the first things she noticed about him. Sweat and leather and blood. Smoke. Wolf. Wolf more than anything else, dark and wild. "I'm tellin' you."

She feels his smile widen. She's given him a command he wouldn't imagine wanting to disobey.

But they do have to leave.

He releases her and she finishes dressing, takes a few minutes to drag a brush through her hair and tie it back, and when she turns around he's dressed too and standing by the window, cigarette between his fingers as he stares out. His head is lowered and his focus is clearly on the street below.

Tight focus. His eyes are sharply narrowed, his teeth are slightly bared.

She feels the hair on her arms begin to rise as she joins him, glancing up at him and then following his gaze. "What?"

He jerks his chin downward. "Someone's there."

At first she thinks there's no way to be certain the man is there for her. He's near her door, sure, pacing the sidewalk and looking down at the phone in his hand, but he could be there for anything, and he's totally nondescript - open jacket against the breeze, worn loose jeans, Braves cap half shadowing his light brown face. He looks like a hundred people she sees every day.

But then he raises his head and looks directly up at her, and her breath catches in her throat as heat pulses into her hands.

"Who is he?"

Daryl shakes his head and steps away. "Dunno. Gonna see."

"I'm comin' with you."

He shoots her a frown over his shoulder, already halfway to the door. "No. You stay behind the wards."

"You're really gonna tell me what to do?" She snatches her jacket from the back of the couch, at his side in four long strides with one palm on the hilt of her knife. "Let's go."

He grits his teeth and she doesn't miss the barely audible growl deep in his chest - not at her but at the situation in general - but he allows her to step past him, and as she starts down the stairs she hears him shut the door behind them.

Kind of hard.

The sunlight stabs briefly at her eyes as she steps out into it, and she blinks, halts. The man is right in front of her, slipping his phone back into his pocket, and her hand is still hovering near her belt as Daryl looms behind her. She doesn't need to see him to know that he's hunching as if ready to charge, head lowered, nostrils flaring. The image is as vivid as if she had rearview mirrors in her eyes.

But the man merely looks her up and down, and she can't detect any malice. Any threat. His eyes flick to Daryl and back to her, and his brows draw together.

"Beth Greene?"

She lifts her head and pushes her shoulders back, stands erect. Strong. The hair on her arms hasn't lain down, but she's not afraid. Suddenly the street seems weirdly deserted and faded, almost _receded_ , as if that other world she now half occupies has shifted and pulled her onto another level of itself, but she belongs here more than she ever knew, and accepting that is proving easier than she ever would have expected. This is her territory. He's on _her_ turf.

He should be the one who's afraid.

"Why?"

"My name is Lawrence." His voice is low, smooth, very calm. "Lawrence Cole. I'm a private detective. Your aunt and uncle's attorney hired me to find you."

She blinks again, and not because of the light. This is unexpected. Actually _unexpected,_ when she was thinking that might not be possible anymore. At her elbow, she feels Daryl stiffen in an echo of her surprise.

If this man is lying, he's an excellent liar.

"Why?" she repeats, and at least she manages to keep her voice steady. Edged, wary, but that isn't betraying the fact that he's just about knocked her on her ass.

She never wanted to see them again. She really thought they might leave her alone.

Cole's mouth thins and he releases a breath. He looks… _regretful._ And as with everything else so far, it seems genuine. "Miss Greene, I'm very sorry to have to tell you this, but-"

But she already knows what's coming. _This_ is not surprising at all. It's not surprising because this is what happens to her, what's going to _keep_ happening, and her core is sagging into the cradle of her hips, all the air flowing out of her as he says it. She didn't love them. It shouldn't matter to her. She doesn't want to feel this. She doesn't want to know. She wanted to be _done._

She wanted to _go._

"Miss Greene, your aunt and uncle are dead."


	38. and all the voices just burn holes

**Chapter 38: and all the voices just burn holes**

She didn't want to come back here the first time. She didn't want to come back a second. If she's honest, she never really thought she would.

Sure as hell not for this.

The ride out was bizarre. Dreamlike. It was the last time they made it, too, but for entirely different reasons. She was seeking out ghosts, then, not being summoned by them. Axel notified by phone borrowed from a faintly bemused Cole, Rick notified by some means she didn't witness and assumed was supernatural rather than technological, then onto the back of his bike and out toward the western edge of the city and beyond, the afternoon sun creeping by overhead and the wind pulling her hair free from its band.

The envelope Cole handed her stuffed into her jacket pocket. Unopened, and she isn't sure she wants to change that.

Though she knows she will. Of course she will. More parts of this that she's fully aware are inevitable.

There's a lot she has to do. Vaguely she's aware of this too. Meet with the attorney. Go over whatever paperwork there is to go over, which she assumes is extensive but who knows. The funeral is tomorrow. She's their closest living relative, or she was, but she's not the _only_ living relative, and it seems that a couple of twice removed cousins she's met all of once have taken over a lot of the legal shit in her absence.

Apparently no one was looking for her at all. Which… She's not certain she's surprised.

All the way out, Cole's smooth, pleasant voice echoing through her mind. Fragments. _Car accident three days ago. Head-on collision. Killed instantly._ And the white letter envelope in his large brown hand, held out to her. _Instructions to give this to you. Very specific._ Sealed. Cole didn't know what it was about, clearly didn't much want to know. He'd been told what he'd been told, had done his job, wanted to be gone.

One more instruction.

 _Take it to the farm._

 _Open it there._

Weird. But again, he seemed to be just fine with not knowing the details, or the logic behind the strangeness.

And by then she was beginning to understand. Without reading the contents of the envelope, without being told anything else, without even really realizing it, she was beginning to understand.

It made her tired.

Now she looks up at the spinning windmill, setting sun making it glimmer as it turns, the pale hulk of the farmhouse at her back. Daryl there too, her silent shadow, standing by the bike and watching her with his bow already on his back. Once again she senses him so vividly it's like seeing him, and she doesn't have to turn.

The wind gusts, flutters the envelope in her hand, pushes tears out of the corners of her eyes. And it might not be only the wind. It's that weariness. She's so sick of death, and it won't leave her alone.

Lying in bed with him, his hand over her belly. She arrived at that point without truly noticing, and once she realized it, it felt like she had always been there. It wasn't a stretch. Maybe it's an almost comically odd thing for her to be thinking about, given who she is and who he is and everything that's happened, but it also fits. Deciding like that, with him. Not just _fucking,_ satisfying that insatiable need. Not just about that.

Maybe it'll hurt them. Kill them.

Or maybe it'll be life.

She opens her eyes and stares down at the envelope. Picks at the edge of the flap with a thumbnail. Gazes out at the long dark ribbon of the empty road through fields of rippling golden grass, and she thinks that maybe it wasn't so bad to come back here. Maybe for a moment she can let go of the reason, even if it's in her hands, and simply _be._

No. There's no time.

She slides her nail beneath the flap and tears it open.

Neatly folded into it is a sheet of paper. She unfolds it, lets the envelope drop into the dust, and looks down, scanning it.

It's blank.

She bites her lip and turns.

He's lifting his lighter and flicking it into flame beneath the cigarette dangling between his lips when he sees her and lowers it, plucks the cigarette free. His eyes shift from her face to the paper and back again, quizzical. Slightly concerned. She wonders what her features are showing.

"What?"

She holds up the paper without a word, flips it around with a sharp little twitch of her wrist and stares at it again as if she can make something appear on it by sheer force of will. Hell, she can apparently set fires and conjure light out of fucking nowhere by sheer force of will, so is that really such a farfetched idea?

Though nothing happens.

His boots scuffle in the dust in front of her; he halts, touches her wrist, and when he takes the paper from her she gives it up without resistance. She watches him as he raises it and holds it against the sun, eyes narrowed.

"Don't make no sense."

"Well, _yeah._ " She turns away and goes into her pocket for her own cigarettes and lighter, lights one up and exhales hard into the cool air. She's angry. At them, at everything. She doesn't want to be, but she is. Just like she doesn't want to be mourning them, but she's doing that too, at least in a distant kind of way. She never felt like they were family, but technically they were, and now, for all intents and purposes…

She's not alone. She has him. She has that.

That might be everything.

"No, I mean that can't be it. All that shit, gettin' it to you like this and it's just blank?" The paper rustles like a leaf and he releases a breath. "Beth…"

She glances over her shoulder in time to see him raising the lighter again, flame held to the corner of the paper, and she almost drops the cigarette as she whips around. "Daryl, what the _fuck?_ "

"Just watch."

She's watching - gaping, as the paper catches and the fire eats its way upward. It's blackening, curling into gray ash and drifting to the ground, and she's about to snatch it out of his hand but it's already too late. All that for nothing, and somehow it's _offensive_.

Except the paper is returning.

The flame licks his fingertips but he doesn't drop the thing, and as it dies back and goes out, the edges of a new sheet of paper - or the _same_ paper - are slowly taking on form and solidity. Transparent but rapidly growing opaque. He keeps holding it by the edge, gaze on hers over its top and a slightly grim smile is tugging at the corner of his mouth.

She snatches it back from him. She's not sure what she expected it to feel like - she didn't expect _any_ of this - but it feels like it did. It feels like regular old everyday printer paper.

Except now there's something there.

She looks at him. He looks back.

"You gonna read it, or you want me to?"

She starts a little, drops her gaze and runs it down the lines.

 _Beth,_ _If you're reading this, they've gotten to us. Honestly it's not a huge surprise. After the rest of them were killed, we guessed it was probably only a matter of time. If you're reading this, they haven't gotten to_ you, _and that's what matters most._

 _If you haven't figured it out, you were right. You were right about all of it, what happened and what you saw. We're so sorry we handled it how we did. Maybe that was a mistake. But ironically, our best protection has always been ignorance. If you don't know, it's harder for them to find you. We were trying to keep you safe. When you ran, we decided it might be better if you stayed lost, even to us, so we didn't look for you. We prayed that wasn't a mistake either._

 _You're a witch, Beth. You're one of an ancient race of them. If you're still alive, then as far as we know you're the last of us. That's a burden no one should have to bear, least of all a teenage girl, but we don't always get to choose our burdens. Assuming you've survived this long, you're strong enough to bear it. You can be stronger. Keeping you shielded by ignorance would be ideal, but like we said: we don't have a choice anymore, so neither do you._

 _They're going to come for you now. They may have already tried. You have to make yourself ready. It's been centuries since any of us fully assumed this birthright, and now you will have to, if you want to stay alive._

 _Go to the top of the hill. In the front of the chimney, you'll see a stone that doesn't look like the rest. Touch it and say the word_ aetynest. _Take what you find there. Use it. Don't be afraid._

 _Your parents loved you. This is their last gift to you. Know that you're blessed by it, and by them._

Gyden treddian eac thu, dohtor. _Goddess walk with you._

She stares at it until she can't see the words anymore. Daryl is once again a shadow in front of her, silent as ever. He's lit his cigarette and the coal of it glows in her own shadow as the sun sets at her back. She's dropped her own, and she's vaguely conscious of it smoldering in the dust, the smoke filling her nose. When she finally speaks it's in a whisper dry as the breeze through the grass.

"How did you know?"

He shrugs. "That thing bein' blank didn't make sense. Like I said. Made a hell of a lot more sense for them to have hidden somethin'."

"The fire?"

Another tight little smile. "Lucky guess."

She blinks at him. "So you could've-"

"Fire seems like it's your thing. That made sense too."

All she can do is nod. It _does_ make sense. He might have been wrong; it doesn't matter, because he wasn't. She lowers her hand to her side and looks away to the right, off toward the hill. The stubby tower of stone. What she knows is _really_ there, now, or what's there besides what she can see in this version of the world.

"They knew." She swallows, and it hurts like a fist squeezing her throat from the inside. "They knew the whole time."

"They were tryin' to keep you safe."

She laughs hollowly. It also hurts, deeper in her chest. "Didn't fuckin' work."

"Still had to try," he says, very quiet, and her breath catches. Everything he's done for her. Everything he's tried to keep her from. _Tortured_ himself because he couldn't bear to put her in danger, even though he had to have known that sooner or later he would have to give in or go insane.

His singular fundamental drive now is to keep her safe, despite the knowledge that he can't.

That's hideously unfair.

She draws a shaky breath and folds the paper up in her fist, wraps her arms around her middle and hugs herself. It's not cold, but she feels cold anyway. "It says we have to go to the hill. There's somethin' there for me."

Out of the corner of her eye she sees him nod. Then he's closer, hand on her shoulder, and she sags back against his chest as he curls himself around her, chin resting on the top of her head. As always, that other body is there behind the one he's wearing, huge and strong and soft. She's not safe, and he can't keep her that way, but like this she feels protected and no way in hell is she going to fight that feeling back.

She wonders if they could ever have anticipated this. Him, with her. What they would say if they were alive to see it.

Maybe they wouldn't be completely astonished.

"C'mon," she says after a moment, and when she gently shrugs him off and walks away, he follows her across the grass.

* * *

One of the things she always liked about the chimney is how the sun catches it in the last hours of the day. The rocks are the color of old bone, and when the sunlight touches them they take on that red-gold color and look somehow otherworldly. She never really thought about that in literal terms; now she can't think about it in any other way. This is a place where two worlds touch, and some part of her has always known that. When she was little she felt safe up here, comfortable, and now she understands.

She stands in front of it for minutes that stretch out and out, gaze working over it stone by stone. One that looks different from the rest; sure, okay, but she can't see one. They're all different in lots of subtle ways, of course, but if there was any markedly unlike the rest, surely she would have noticed that before now. She's spent more time up here than she could hope to quantify.

She steps closer, bending slightly and peering.

"What're we lookin' for?"

"Stone that ain't like the rest." She considers taking the paper out of her pocket and checking it, but there's no point. She knows what it said, and she remembers what she's supposed to say. "Do you…"

She trails off as her attention stops at the base of the chimney, where a number of stones have come loose and gathered in a small pile of rubble. The rubble is relatively new, though she's pretty sure she's seen it before, but all at once she's seeing it differently, and she crouches in front of it, lifting the stones aside. At first they're cool in her hands, but as she clears them away they get warmer.

And she doesn't think it's because of the sun.

"Here." She doesn't quite gasp when she sees it, but she comes close, and her stomach flutters against her diaphragm. All her weariness is gone and now _excited_ is the only word she can think of - not altogether happily so. She strongly suspects that what's been left for her here isn't going to make her life any easier.

Not that anything could.

Beneath her spread hand, set into the base of the chimney, is a darker stone that's less weathered than the rest, its cut neater, and she can tell that it's the source of the warmth. Daryl sets his bow down in the grass and crouches beside her, bent as close as she is, and though she doesn't shift her gaze from her hand, she catches his glance and the glitter of his eyes.

"What now?"

Now. She inhales, long and slow. Yet again, she doesn't need the word translated. There's only one thing it _could_ mean - but it's more than that. Has been for a while.

She _understands._

"Aetynest," she says softly. Barely more than a breath.

 _Open._

For a few seconds, nothing. Then, silent, the stone melts away beneath her palm and leaves behind only a wide, dark hole in the chimney and a remnant of heat in the air.

She's not surprised when he draws his knife. She can't sense any alarm in him, but he wouldn't be anything but careful, which she appreciates. Because she's not drawing her own. She's reaching into the hole with both hands, her heart a knot in her chest. This is a moment. She's certain. This is something she'll look back on and know was a cusp, a place she could never return from, a place she never could have avoided. And whoever those people she called her _aunt_ and _uncle_ really were, besides her blood, they didn't put that stone in place.

This is something far older.

At first she's not positive _what_ she's touching. It feels like a large wooden box, except it also doesn't feel like anything of the kind. Wide and thick and heavy, so smooth it's nearly slick. Yet there's a fine grain in its surface, and it seems almost to move under her fingertips, to flow like something semi-liquid.

And it's warm again. More than warm. Thrumming. As if blood is running somewhere far under that smooth surface.

She feels over its top to its edges and down its sides, and stops when she reaches what have to be handles, outward swoops and lines. She hooks her fingers under them and pulls.

It's large. But somehow it's not heavy. She lifts it out easily and sets it down, gazing wordlessly at it, framing it with her hands.

It is indeed a box. It does indeed look like wood. It does indeed also look like nothing of the kind, its deep, rich color shifting from black to an inky purple and back again, untouched by the stain of the sunlight. Its surface is featureless except for the handles and a plain silver latch in front. Not a lock. Merely a latch.

She looks up at Daryl, who meets her eyes, and doesn't have to comment. Silver. Not a sure-fire protection, but protection nonetheless.

When it was first put here, very possibly the Hathsta would still have been ready to kill for it. Because once they would have been.

She knows that as well as she knows anything else.

Her fingertips ghost over the latch and it opens as silently as the stone vanished, the lid slowly lifting on its own.

A book.

No; _books,_ in two stacks _._ Not big - no bigger than a sizable trade paperback - but clearly very old, the brown leather covers of the two on top worn glossy by touch. The covers themselves are as plain as the box except for single words that she guesses have to be titles.

 _Fyr. Waeter._

She picks up _Fyr_. The box was light, but the book is heavy as one of the stones - and so hot she almost drops it. Beneath it is another book, identical except for the title.

 _Loft_.

Daryl sucks in a hard breath.

"What?" She doesn't look up. She can't. But she can still see him in the periphery of her vision, and he knows. He knows _exactly_ what it is. And maybe he wasn't _meant_ to be here with her, but she can't ignore the sense, as strong as the heat, that it's no accident. That nothing here is.

"It's a grimoire." He rocks backward on his heels, hand loosely grasping his knife as he rubs the other over his chin. "They all are."

"Grimoire?"

"Yeah." His incisors flash as he pulls his lips back and huffs a laugh. "Yeah. Maybe you ain't got no one to teach you magic, girl, but someone saw that comin'. And they left you some textbooks."


	39. hope predictions of future come true

**Chapter 39: hope predictions of future come true**

She kneels there for what feels like a considerable length of time, _Fyr_ in her lap, staring down at it as her mind does nothing in particular.

 _Textbook._ Yes. It makes sense. And it's also more than that. It's a hell of a lot more. Because this is her _birthright,_ apparently, and if it's been hidden this well for this long…

Daryl remains beside her, rocked back on his heels, and she can feel the gentle pressure of his attention. But it's not solely on her; it wanders, and she senses it shifting everywhere in rapid turn. He's on high alert - which also makes sense, because what is she risking by even _touching_ this thing, if she's the first person in perhaps centuries to do so? This is a place of some degree of safety, Eostre clearly has some power here, but how much? Is she now glowing like a beacon to the right eyes?

The _wrong_ eyes.

She passes her fingers across the warm leather of the cover, and as she does Daryl moves, drops onto all fours and edges slightly away as he begins to change. She looks at him then because even now she can't not, and as always she's riveted to the point of breathlessness as his body grows and swells, rippling with muscle and fur, claws digging into the ground and his bones snapping when he arches his spine.

But he doesn't stop there. He shrinks, pulls inward and down and into the form of the true wolf, the last of the sun once more catching the brown and red in his fur and making it almost glow. He shakes himself and edges forward, snuffles at her cheek, and without thinking she raises a hand and strokes it over his head, settling over the knob of bone behind his skull. With another quiet _whuff_ he nuzzles her again, and she breathes a laugh at the cold wetness of his nose.

Why he's changed to this form, she's not sure. His senses, perhaps; it's possible - she realizes that she doesn't know for certain - that they actually aren't keenest when he's in fierd. And if he's on watch, maybe this is best for him.

Or maybe he just wanted to. His version of kicking his boots off and stretching in the cool evening air.

He does stretch. He steps back and rolls the front of his body down over the ground, front legs fully extended and head tipped up, eyes squeezed shut. She watches, distantly bemused, and he rises, shakes himself again, and walks around the side of the chimney, sniffing at the stones with his full tail swishing.

Again she wonders how much of the man is still in there. How much is purer animal.

She looks down at the book again, at the box, and sighs. "The hell'm I gonna do with these?"

It's clearly not a question she expects an answer to, and she glances up in time to see him raising his head, ears pricked. He gazes at her for a moment with his pale blue eyes, gives her a soft whine, and goes back to his inspection of the debris.

What she's going to do is get them home. Somehow. Or she's going to get them back to Atlanta, anyway, and maybe Rick can tell her where the fuck she goes from here. Maybe Michonne, or Shane. Someone. Keeping them at her apartment might not be the best idea, wards or no wards and sigils or no sigils, and possibly she _is_ going to have to alter her living situation for a while. Possibly it really won't be safe anymore.

Not that it ever was.

 _You're thinking too far ahead, Bethy. You're trying to do it all at once. Again. You should stop that._

She closes her eyes and ducks her head, the loose strands of her hair tickling her cheeks and jaw. She doesn't want to think about Daddy now. Not now. Not any of them, the death that keeps following her around, that she doesn't seem to be able to prevent and that probably isn't over.

And what the fuck else can she lose?

 _Stop._

She opens her eyes in a kind of forceful pop and lifts the book's cover.

It's not much of a shock when there's no English in sight.

Instead of recognizable letters, the page - it actually feels like some kind of parchment, stiff to the touch, and it comes to her that it might genuinely be skin of some kind - is covered with squiggles and lines, sharp angles and swooping curves, all of it graceful and all of it somehow familiar. She flips to a single complex symbol that takes up an entire page, then to more of the illegible characters, and that's when she realizes where she's seen it before.

Her knife. It's exactly the same as the etchings on her knife.

The _Reord_ _a Bealu_.

So Daryl can read it. All the others, almost certainly. That's something. But as she turns another page and another, revealing line after line and more symbols and diagrams that look almost mathematical, her throat locks up and her eyes start to sting, and it's infuriating. Because she should know how to read this. Someone should have been here to teach her before now. There shouldn't have been any hiding. There shouldn't have been any need for protection. She should have known every part of this from the moment she was capable of knowing it at all.

She looks up from the book and down the hill, the grass a darker sea in the gathering dusk as the last of the sun begins to sink behind the horizon. Further on are the fences along the pastures, the empty place where the barn and stable and chicken coop used to be, the foundations that are all that remain of the house. Everything that _isn't_ there more than everything that _is_.

For the first time, it hits her fully and completely how _wrong_ everything has gone. And it didn't begin with her.

It's been wrong for much, much longer than that.

Another soft whine close beside, and when she turns at the waist he's there, a deep shadow in the twilight. He cocks his head slightly, obviously questioning, and gives her shoulder a gentle nudge with his nose.

She lets the book fall closed and curls her arms wordlessly around his neck, presses her face into his fur and breathes in the pleasant, faintly musky scent of clean animal. He drops onto his haunches and she keeps hugging him, and after a moment or two she feels the weight of his paw on her thigh.

Like before, she feels so different with him when he's in this form. None of the easy, instinctive attraction she feels when he's a man, none of the intensely ravenous desire she feels when he's in fierd. She feels like _a girl with her wolf,_ something so simple and so _young_ about the sensation - a creature who won't judge, who won't ask questions or make things complicated, who will be perfectly content to sit here in silence and be hugged by her for as long as she wants to hug him.

So maybe he took this form because he knew she would need it.

"Good boy," she whispers, pulls in a shuddering breath, and almost laughs. It doesn't feel weird to say it. Not like this. It just feels right. "That's a good boy."

* * *

But eventually she has to let go, and do all that figuring-out she's putting off.

It's getting well and truly dark now, and they have to get back. Or she assumes they do; there's nowhere here for them to stay unless they grab a motel room, and somehow the thought of that isn't appealing at all. They also have to carry the box down the hill and get it secured on the bike, and while she's sure they can manage that, it's one more job to do. She's starting to get chilly, and even after she releases him she stays pressed up against his warm, soft side, staring out at the farm with her knees drawn up to her chest and the book mostly forgotten next to her.

"The hell'm I gonna do?" she murmurs again, and he lets out a grunt. It sounds like general agreement with her frustration, and she appreciates it, even if it's of little practical help. She kicks at the grass, cutting into the dirt with the heel of her boot. "We can't stay here."

Another grunt. More agreement.

She sighs. "You should change back. You need to be able to talk to me."

No response. Instead he pulls away and she hears the cracks, and feels the brief pressure of his side against hers as he passes through the peak of his size. And then he's just a man again, sitting next to her with his elbows resting on his knees and looking at her sidelong through his hair.

"Can I take them back to my place?"

It's a question she had mostly answered for herself, so it's not unexpected when he shakes his head. "Not safe. Not even with what I did. They'll draw 'em like fresh meat."

"Your place, then?"

"Probably best for now." He's quiet for a moment, then: "You gonna want to come back tomorrow?"

She turns more fully to him, frowning. "What for?"

"Funeral. Right?"

"Oh." She releases another sigh, heavier, and once more swipes loose hair away from her face. "Right. God. I…" She doesn't lower her hands, instead covering her face and dropping her head to rest on her knees. "I don't want to. I really don't fuckin' want to."

"So don't."

She jerks her head up. Somehow this hadn't occurred to her as an option. "What?"

"Don't," he repeats patiently, and rolls a shoulder. "Ain't no one makin' you. You been gone all this time, the fuck's it matter if you ain't there?"

"But they're family." It's all she can think to say. She never felt any affection for them whatsoever, never _liked_ them, but they were protecting her, even if she didn't know it, even if how they were doing it was wall to wall humiliation and misery, and she's here now with these books that might save her life, and it's because of them.

Her middle is churning with it. She has no idea how she feels.

"Yeah, and they probably wouldn't even want you there." He lifts his hand and gnaws thoughtfully at the edge of his thumb. "If somethin' got to 'em and they're after you - and shit, we _know_ they are - don't you think they might be lookin' for you to be there?" The corner of his mouth pulls into a small, grim smile. "Shit, magden, that's the _last_ place you wanna be."

"Oh." She looks at him, looks away. She doesn't think he's saying it only to assist her in talking herself out of it. He wouldn't.

And he's right.

"Alright." She pushes to her feet, groaning as her stiff legs make their stiffness known, and reaches down to put _Fyr_ back into the box. Fire and water. She'd bet that the others below are air and earth, which seems reasonable. The four elements often show up in stories about magic. Stands to reason they might be included in the real deal.

Fire. Fire is _her thing._ She doesn't think it's her imagination when she feels a hot tingle in her fingertips as she closes the lid and latches it.

"C'mon." Daryl slings his bow onto his back and bends, takes hold of the handles, lifts the box as if it weighs nothing at all. "Let's get this shit outta here before somethin' comes to check it out."

* * *

It's the last dregs of twilight when they reach the bike, the light gone that cool slate blue that marks the edge of real dark. An owl calls and a car passes on the road, headlights streaming out in front of it, and like this, standing with her back to what's left of the house, she can almost believe that she'd see it again if she turned. Right there, lights on in the kitchen and living room - and dinner on the table when she went inside. Her mother's meatloaf and fresh, fragrant cornbread.

And it _is_ there. In the Scead, it stands. Silent and empty and dim, its rooms full of blood and ruin, but it's there.

For a moment - a strange moment that she doesn't at all enjoy - she nearly asks Daryl to open the Night Gate and take them in so she can go to the door, walk inside, climb the stairs to whatever remains of her room and curl up in the cold ghost of her bed.

She's not done grieving this place. These people. This home. She probably never will be.

She still hasn't found anything she would consider even the poorest kind of replacement, either.

Unless it's him. His arms, like this afternoon - and once again, hours feel like days to her. Days since he pulled her into his arms and she snuggled into his fur, warm and safe. And she didn't think of it that way at the time, but maybe it felt a little like a home.

The closest thing she has now.

Movement behind her, and his hand on her shoulder. "It's on the back," he says softly. "Whenever you're ready."

She drags in a long breath and nods. Another thing occurs to her then, a hard fact that doesn't comfort her in the least and only makes her tired all over again: this place is probably hers now. Fully hers. No one is holding it in trust, unless it's the attorney himself. And even if he is, he won't be able to do anything but keep it. She'll have it. For all intents and purposes, she's the sole owner of the Greene farm and all its related assets.

At last she turns and looks at him. His face is almost entirely hidden in shadow, but as usual his eyes catch the light, and in addition to the glitter, when another car passes on the road she catches the faint flicker of mirrored green-gold on his retinas.

"I don't know if I ever wanna come back here again."

Another flicker as he blinks. He says nothing.

She supposes there's nothing much to say.

In silence she follows him to the bike, and in silence she climbs on behind him, circles her arms around his middle and lays her head against his back. This never stops being comfortable, _comforting,_ and she can let go of what's strapped behind her and what it means, and let him carry her down the drive and out onto the road, swinging back toward the city.

He was right. She doesn't have to be at the funeral. She probably shouldn't be. She doesn't intend to be, and the more she thinks about it, even in the most distant way, the more she's certain she doesn't want to return to the farm at all. She wants to be done with it, with its unseen ghosts, and she suspects that now she can be. She's taken everything she needs from it. This was an ending, even if it wasn't exactly a goodbye.

But it's still hard. She's still holding on.

To him. She's holding onto him. And as usual when she's tired, the smooth speed of the bike is lulling. She drowses and then must go deeper than a drowse, because when she next opens her eyes, he's pulling them up the ramp of the warehouse and easing to a stop in the cavernous dimness.

What she feels is relief.

This might be a kind of home, now, too.

* * *

He carries the box up the stairs to his den. She follows close behind, goes about the business of lighting candles, and watches as he sets it down against the wall close by his makeshift bed.

She crosses her arms. "Will they be safe here?"

"Probably safe as they can be anywhere. Except where they were." He grunts and straightens up. "This place has its own protections, like I said. I got guard duty, but I'm not what _really_ keeps shit out."

That makes sense. She nods. Doesn't need to know the details. That he's sure of it is more than enough.

But it doesn't quell the sudden tension in her, twisting around her spine, and it must show on her face, because when he turns to her his brows draw together in something that stops just short of a frown.

"What?"

"I…" She ducks her head, hugs herself a little tighter. Back here in his den, with him, she should be able to find some peace. She did last night. She was the one who soothed _him._ And yet. "We got like… half a day. Half a day without dealing with some kinda shit. Now we got that." She jerks her chin at the box. "Just makin' everything even _more_ complicated. And I can't even read the damn things."

Comprehension spreads across his face, and he comes to her, lays his hands over her upper arms, tugs her closer and presses his lips to her brow. Like some kind of magic in itself, calm flows into and through her, pouring all down her insides like water. It doesn't wash the tension out of her but it does _submerge_ it, and it's easier to breathe.

She unfolds her arms and wraps them around him, leans into him as he holds her.

"Seft, magden," he murmurs. "You will."

"Yeah?" Dry amusement seeps into her voice as she tips her head back and gazes up at him with one brow arched. He seems very certain. "You gonna teach me?"

He shakes his head. "Probably not gonna have to."

Confusion. She freezes and stares at him, nonplussed. She couldn't read _anything_ she saw. It might as well have been the scratchings of an idle chicken. "The hell're you talkin' about?"

The corner of his mouth creeps upward. "You ain't noticed?"

"Noticed what?"

His teeth catch his lip for a few thoughtful seconds, then he appears to decide something. "Thu cunnan hit furthum. Oncnawaest se?"

A question. So she's expected to supply an answer. She blinks, mouth slightly open, and is about to demand that he explain what he's asking her when the words…

The words unravel.

It's happened before, she realizes. It's happened with him in the last couple of days, in her bed, in his; he's whispered to her, told her things, shared them in a way that comes closer to his true meanings than English can reach. Somehow she needed no explanation for them. She didn't need him to translate. She understood him perfectly well.

And there wasn't enough context for her to have figured them out from context alone. Not the way she has.

Now it happens again. The words enter her mind, unfamiliar and unintelligible, but they don't rest in that state. They take hold of her and pull her close, and at the same time they rearrange themselves, strangeness reforming into familiarity, unintelligibility into coherence.

 _You know it already. Do you understand that?_

Her mouth drops open wider, and she doesn't even feel irritation at his obvious amusement. "How?"

"With anyone else it'd just be Heala. With you it's probably more than that. You're a witch, anyway. Some of this shit, you got born with, even if you didn't know it." He shrugs. "When the bond brings you behind the veil, it doesn't stop there. You pick other shit up. Make connections. I told you, you're changin' 'cause of this thing. Not like me, but you are."

She lets out a quick, hard, incredulous laugh. Though maybe not as incredulous as it might have been. "So I… I what, _telepathically learn a new language?_ "

He shrugs again. "Pretty much."

"Jesus." Another few seconds of staring, then she nods over at the box. "But I couldn't read anythin' in the one. Didn't make any sense at all."

"Reading's tougher than hearin'. Least when it happens like this. It'll come slower. Speakin', that'll come slowest of all. But it'll come." He pauses, appears to hesitate, then lifts his hands and frames her face. His eyes are very clear and very bright, and she's not sure it's only the candlelight. "Lufiend. Thu forstrange. Thu furthum agan fela neadprin."

 _Sweetheart. You're so strong. You already have so much of what you need._

Her breath catches in her throat and clutches at itself, and she raises her hands and curls them around his wrists, simply holding. Words don't come easy to him; that much is abundantly clear. Not in English.

But in his own tongue, they flow. In his own tongue, he might be a poet.

She swallows past the clench of her breath and turns her head a little, nuzzling briefly at his palm. She's not frightened. But what she's feeling isn't altogether unlike it. "What else is gonna change?" Slow breath. "Y'know. After?"

"I dunno," he says softly. "A lot, maybe. Maybe not much at all."

Unspoken: _If we survive. If we're whole on the other side._

"I'm not afraid," she whispers.

"I know. I ain't either." He sweeps his thumbs across her cheeks. "Not anymore."

* * *

Dinner is cans of three-bean chili heated on Daryl's propane camp stove. For about ten seconds she wishes they had stopped somewhere and picked something up; then she's practically falling into the damn thing, shoveling it into her mouth so fast that she burns her tongue. She pauses, hisses, then starts in again. The waffles from the morning are distant memories, and she wonders if she's cursed from now on to eat meals only when she's starved to the point of no longer even being aware of how hungry she is.

She finishes, drops the can onto the floor and sits with her back against the closed door and sighs. Once again he's slower than her, and by the time he's done she's on her way to dozing. His movement as he picks up the cans prods her to full consciousness, and she yawns, rubs at her eyes, watches as he put the cans into a plastic trash bag and uncaps a bottle of water.

"What about Rick?"

Daryl gulps, wipes his mouth on his sleeve and tosses the bottle over to her. "What about him?"

"Isn't he gonna be wonderin' what happened?"

"I'll tell him. Least that we're okay, we're gettin' some rest and I'll be in touch tomorrow."

She pauses with the bottle halfway to her lips, cocks her head, glances around the room as if a cell phone might appear from thin air. Which is no longer unreasonable. "How?"

He doesn't answer. He merely gives her a tiny curl of a smile, sinks into a crouch and unsheathes his knife. She sits forward, rubbing her eyes again, deeply interested through her drowsiness. That he has some other way of contacting Rick - that she's guessed. But he's never showed her.

He shoots her another glance, seemingly just to make sure she's paying attention, then spreads his left hand, palm up, and slices the blade across it.

She gasps. Stares. Blood is dripping from his slightly cupped hand onto the floor, but except for a faint wince when he did the actual cut, he appears to be in no pain. It comes back to her, what he told her when she first noted his rapidly fading injuries.

 _We heal quick._

And his knife is not silver.

He sets the knife aside and curls his cut hand into a first, forcing the trickle of blood to thicken as he dips his fingers into it and draws a small, swift circle. "This is a Calling Rune."

The initial shock is vanishing fast, and she pushes up to her knees and edges forward, nodding. His hand is moving again, fingers making another sweeping arc, a thick circle in the center. Now it looks vaguely like a target. "Does it have to be blood?"

"Yeah. It's an offering." He stops and rocks back on his heels, eyes half closed as he relaxes his hand and blood drips from his fingertips. The flow is already slowing. "There's… things. Creatures. They live in the spaces between. When you ask 'em right, they'll carry messages."

"The spaces between what?"

" _Between._ " His eyes are fully closed now, his brows drawing together as he leans forward and suspends his open hand over the rune. "Shh."

She falls silent, watching the rune. His hand. Him. There's nothing that she can see; no odd light, no movement, no little sprite-things dancing out of nowhere. Just him, and after a moment or two he grunts, nods, lowers his hand and presses it to the center of the thing.

Another moment of silence. Then he opens his eyes, lifts his hand, and gropes in his back pocket for his bandanna. "Alright."

"Wait." She shakes her head, feeling somehow cheated. "Wait, that was… That was it?"

"Yep." He uncaps the bottle of water again, spills some onto the bandanna, begins to clean the blood from his hand. "He knows. We're good."

"But you didn't say anythin'."

"Not that you saw. You gotta know better than that by now, though." He gives her another tiny, teasing smile as he wipes the blood from the floor. There's not really all that much. "I'll show you how. You should know. Not tonight, though."

She breathes a laugh, considering her own knife. The prospect of doing that. "Yeah, that's fine. I don't heal quick as you."

"No." He's looking at her with a very strange expression dancing around the edges of his features. His smile hasn't faded, but it's deepened somehow, and there's something behind it that's almost… sad. She looks back at him, and she wants to go to him, curl against his side. Make that particular smile go away. "But you will."

* * *

There's something so unremarkable in how they go to bed.

No uncertainty. No hesitation, or negotiation. He blows out the candles and undresses as she does, and she feels his eyes on her as the moonlight pours over her and pools simmering between her thighs. That need is there, that hunger, but it's still bearable - very, and when he settles beside her and reaches down and strokes his fingers over her bush and clit and lips, she sighs and opens to him and if anything it relaxes her more. It's very slow, how he does it, one finger in her and then two, smooth unhurried slides of his hand as her loose moans drift into the air like smoke.

He was so afraid to do this. Now it's like kissing her goodnight, simple and easy, finding a rhythm that works best for her and matching it with the steady rocking of his own hips, his cock smearing precome across her skin. And she knows she doesn't have to, not to get him there, but she _wants_ to: she wriggles a hand between them and curls her fingers around his shaft and jerks him off in time to the beat of the pleasure he's pumping into her.

It doesn't take a lot more speed, or a lot more time. He's kissing her when she crests and falls, when he follows her, thick sounds rolling from her throat into his and back again, his teeth sharp on her lips and tongue and his come warm and sticky over her fingers.

She's already half asleep when he finishes licking her clean. He's big and solid, gathering her into his arms with his tongue rough on the edge of her palm, and with her eyes closed and only half of her present, she's uncertain _what_ form he's in. She might feel fur. It might only be skin. His tongue and those teeth, and the way she feels small - and it doesn't matter. She's awake enough to know that much.

He's both. All three. All at once.

He can be everything she needs.


	40. the pain that we left at the station

**Note:** We're moving back into territory where I'm juggling multiple characters and multiple very involved plot/worldbuilding balls, and I need to proceed with care. That means updates might be even slower than usual, though I'll do what I can. The next chapter is started, so.

I'm also alternating chapters between this and _Everything Where it Belongs,_ since that fic is now in its third act and dragging itself toward its ending. So that's an additional contributing factor.

Porn is a lot easier, guys. A _lot_ easier. At least in some ways.

❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 40: the pain that we left at the station will stay in a jar behind us**

Next morning, she catches Axel at the gas station.

He's perturbed. Very. His ridiculous mustache is twitching and his eyes are bright with anxiety and something that Beth guesses wants to be anger and isn't quite getting there. He stands behind the counter, both hands braced on it and spread as if he needs to hold himself up, and he studies her in a way that has nothing to do with taking a gander at her tits.

In purely practical terms, she was never sure why he did that anyway. The first time she noticed it, she considered - with mild but deep exasperation - asking him why exactly he saw anything much there to look at.

Not that she's sensitive. She's just self-aware.

Either way. He studies her and she stands there and allows it, arms crossed over her chest. "It's gonna be a hassle for a while." She shifts her stance to a more solid position. Not sure how much it's doing with him, but it makes her feel a little better. "It's just me now, far as family goes. There's a lot to handle."

"I know, alright, I just…" He shakes his head and releases a tense sigh. "Look, I need someone to cover shifts, and I can't just keep makin' do like this, so-"

 _So fucking hire someone else,_ she nearly says, and doesn't. It wouldn't particularly help her case, here, and anyway he might actually go ahead and do it, and regardless of what else is going on, she's still going to be expected to pay rent, and she still needs to eat.

Unless there's a spell in one of those goddamn books that makes it possible to conjure money out of thin air. Which there might very well be.

"I'm not sayin' I can't work at _all._ " She hid her exasperation the first time he gave her a series of up-and-downs. She's not hiding it now, irrespective of the cause, her voice tense with every particle of it that she feels. "I'm just sayin' I need some flexibility for a bit. Probably not long. I'll do the best I can."

No promises. She can't afford to make any of those.

And besides, she likes Axel. Enough to not want to completely screw him over, anyway.

He sighs again and looks down at the scuffed countertop. There's a thin ring of some congealed sticky liquid, probably sugary, as if something spilled from a cup. A single ant is gorging itself on it, and for some reason it holds her attention. Possibly it holds his as well.

"Alright. You get a few days." He raises his head at the same time she does, and resignation is weighing down his features. His mustache is drooping slightly. She hadn't honestly expected him to fire her, but she feels a rush of relief all the same. It's not even that it's money. It's stability, some last trace of it from the second life she's lost in a year, and there's not much of that to go around anymore.

So she gives him a smile. Not wide, but genuine. "Thanks."

He lifts a hand and a single cautioning finger. " _A few days._ After that I ain't gonna make no promises."

"Okay."

"And get yourself a new damn phone." He pauses, peering at her again, resignation and anxiety both dissipated and an expression she identifies as open concern replacing them. He meant it the last time, and he means it now, and something tightens in her chest.

He cares about her. He does, and for more than her _tits,_ such as they are. By now she knows not to take that for granted.

"Are you alright?"

She gazes at him in silence for a moment. They're alone in the gas station, the humming of the fridge and the slurpee machine and the tinny pop music playing on the single speaker in the corner the only sounds. Daryl is outside with the bike, and she's glad he agreed to remain there. She doesn't think him standing beside her would make this any more comfortable.

She would have a harder time thinking of what to say right now. His presence would give the answer additional weight. Meaning.

And she realizes that she wants to be honest. Inasmuch as she can be.

"No," she says finally, and gives him another smile. It feels tired and crooked, and it probably is. "But I will be."

He looks as if he might be about to say something else, but instead he merely nods. He doesn't appear at all satisfied, and she didn't expect him to be. But it's not as if she can help that. _I'm a witch with a werewolf slave and we're in love, fucking him could kill us both and I'm going to fuck him anyway, and oh by the way also apparently the world is ending_ very likely wouldn't go over too well. "Okay. Well. Just." He rolls an uneasy shoulder and lowers his eyes again. "Keep in touch. Come in tonight if you can. Seven to two. I gotta get some sleep."

"Yeah."

She steps back from the counter, unfolds her arms and glances around. Not that she thinks anything will have changed or that there's anything much to see. Simply that it's hitting her that she actually kind of _misses_ this place, and it might not even be about the last shreds of stability and what used to pass for normality. At least not only.

It was okay being here, some nights. Sometimes it only made it harder to get out of her own head, and Christ knows all that time staring at the porn mags and fending off oily small-hour creepers didn't do one iota of good for her psyche. But sometimes it actually helped her get away from herself. Sometimes something about it made it possible for her to sit behind that counter or restock the shelves and just… be.

She's not sure she's ever going to have that again.

"Thanks," she repeats softly, turns and heads for the door without a look back.

* * *

Daryl is leaning against the wall beside the door when she steps outside and looks to her right, half-smoked cigarette dangling from his lip and his hands in his pockets. He studies her from beneath his hair, and it rushes through her all over again, the sheer disparity between how this man looks and how he actually is. And not just because he's not even a man.

He looks utterly criminal. He would horrify her parents, were they around to be horrified by him. And in so many ways, he's the sweetest man she's ever met.

She gives him half a smile and he jerks his chin at the door. "Everythin' alright?"

"Yeah. I guess so." She sighs. Not hard, but a sigh nonetheless. "I'm not fired, and that's what matters most right now."

It isn't. Saying it reminds her of that, and she feels faintly ridiculous. But her attention lands on his bike a few yards away, on the box strapped to the back of it, and the fact is that feeling ridiculous is a luxury she can't afford. She's not frantic. Not panicking. Not even exactly scared. But events have resumed their happening, and whatever peace they once again managed to scrounge together the night before might be the last they get for a long time.

Might not. But every second of peace they find is precious now.

Daryl grunts, pushes away from the wall and plucks the cigarette from between his lips. He nods at the patch of pavement she's standing on, where she can see faint lines and curves nearly identical to the ones outside her door. "Did the sigils over anyway. They should hold for a while."

"Not against everythin'."

He shrugs. "Most things."

"I might not even be back here for _a while._ " She steps forward a few paces, and turns and looks back at the store, a little place with grimy walls and grimy window - grimy no matter how many times she wiped it down - low roof stained with years of dirty rain. Illegible graffiti scrawled across one side. Another sigil just to the left of the door. She bites her lip and murmurs, "I might not be back at all."

"Even if you ain't," he says quietly from her side. "Your boss could probably use it."

She shoots him a glance, frowning. This hadn't occurred to her. "He's a target?"

"Girl, anyone close to you's a target."

He sounds grimly amused, and it makes sense to sound that way. She figures that in general, one either finds some humor in this type of situation or it drives you insane. More than it already is. And by this time, she's mostly decided that feeling guilty about what she ultimately doesn't and never did control isn't going to do anyone any goddamn good.

Sure as hell won't make anyone safer.

She snorts a laugh, equally grim, and starts toward the bike. "Let's get the hell outta here."

But she catches a final glimpse of Axel through the window as Daryl pulls out toward the street, and once more something turns over in her chest. He's not looking at her, instead looking down at something on the counter, or at nothing at all, clearly unaware that he's being observed. Yes, she's put him in danger, even if it's not in any meaningful way her fault, but even more, he's a kind man, whatever his occasional creepiness, and he's been nothing but decent to her when it would be very easy to not be anything of the kind.

She might be back tonight, or some other time soon. She should make as much of an effort as she can. He can only be so patient with her. And she still needs the money.

And someone should check on him. Someone who actually has some vague idea of what the fuck is actually going on.

But one way or another, as with the farm, this was another kind of goodbye.

She turns back and lays her head between Daryl's shoulderblades, watches scrub-choked wasteland and run-down buildings and wide stretches of dull yellow grass slide by as they pick up speed. It's late morning, another clear, cool autumn day, and she realizes that it's November. Must be. October slipped by without her noticing. She's losing her grip on time, and not merely because she's been spending so much of it in a place where time doesn't even work the same way.

Just more of her passage into a world that isn't quite hers, yet in fact always has been.

The leaves and grass shimmer very faintly at the edges, brilliant through the flat yellow-tan-browns. The blue sky is cold and hard, reminding her of photos of Antarctic icebergs. Something about the quality of the ride makes her feel as if they're floating, hovering maybe only a few inches above the ground but airborne all the same.

She glances up. Flying far, far overhead, so high that it would be easy to mistake for a plane, sunlight flashes off something metallic and reflective that is in no way a plane in any respect. Wide wings. Long body. Long tail.

Not the first time she's seen it. She keeps forgetting to ask him about that.

Not now. She reaches back with one hand and touches the side of the box. Now there's this, and the cyne.

And then they'll see.

* * *

About a half hour later, Daryl is taking them down a long road lined on both sides by broad, well-kept lawns and small wooded patches, equally well-kept houses set back a good distance at the end of extended driveways. At some point not too far behind, they passed the Atlanta city limits and entered College Park, but beyond that she has no idea where they are.

Somewhere pretty. Somewhere nice. She's not sure what she's expecting, but somehow she's not surprised. Rick Grimes has a family. This is the kind of place she's used to thinking of Families living in, even now.

Abruptly Daryl swings them to the right, down a shorter and narrower street and up a sloping drive on the left, a plain white house surrounded by more of that mowed green lawn. Not as much lawn as some of the other places they passed, but still. A lot. Wide and pretty, even dying back for the winter.

A medium-sized SUV is parked in front of an open garage, another larger one right behind it and a compact directly behind that. A kid's bicycle is parked on its side by the front walk. A long flowerbed borders the walk, another one along the porch. A football is lying in the grass.

A werewolf cop lives here, and it's so goddamn _normal._

Daryl pulls to a stop behind the compact and the engine rumbles into silence. For a moment neither of them moves, both looking up at the front door - it's freshly painted white, a bunch of decorative corn hung at eye level - and Beth listens to the wind hissing through the treetops, dancing a scatter of brown leaves across the driveway.

She sighs, and Daryl shoots a glance over his shoulder. "Y'alright?"

Soft. Not exactly concerned, but he really wants to know, and he's not implicitly anticipating a _yes._

She has no idea why this should feel so uncomfortable, but it does.

"Not really," she murmurs, and climbs off the bike, stretching until her lower spine cracks. "Let's go."

She's already walking when she hears him slinging his bow over his shoulder and unstrapping the box from the back, his heavy footfalls behind her a few seconds later. She's the stranger here, even if she's not completely, and it would probably be wiser to let him take point - but then again it might not matter at all. And anyway, he's at her side by the time she steps onto the porch.

"Hey." His hands aren't free, but he nudges her shoulder with his, and when she looks up at him he's smiling very slightly. "It'll be fine. We'll figure this out." He nods down at the box in his arms. "And Lori's a nice lady. Pretty nice, anyhow."

 _Lori._ And suddenly she knows why this is uncomfortable, why the very idea of coming to Rick's _home_ and seeing Rick's _family_ has been eating at her since they left the warehouse, gnawing at her with increasing intensity every mile they traveled through. Why she hasn't felt this antsy since she first met any of these people, a pack of monsters who had no reason to trust her.

This house. The lawn. The SUV and the football and the bike. Rick and Lori and two kids. The _normality_ of it.

She's looking at something she lost. Not something she _had,_ though it is that. But even more, she had a chance to have her own version of this. A nice house, a husband. Children. She wanted that. She was sure that this tableau she's standing in the middle of was the very picture of her future. She took it entirely for granted. Until she lost every chance to be _normal_ that she might ever have had.

Even with a life that goes above and beyond what she was living - in sheer insanity if nothing else - and even with someone to love and other things she can't even allow herself to consider directly, not yet… she'll never have this.

Or it won't be anything like she imagined.

She glances at him again, and he's looking expectantly at her - and she realizes why: she has hands free for the purposes of knocking. But for a few seconds she doesn't move. She just gazes at him, this sweet, gentle man who doesn't look sweet or gentle at all and is not in any way a man, and she thinks about that _normal life_ and how, inside its borders, there would be no place for him. He could be in it, but he could never belong.

Even if he knows these people, even if this is his _family,_ he's as much of a stranger here as she is.

He cocks his head, frowning now. "What?"

She's smiling. She feels it all at once, and it feels good. Not wide, but he doesn't trade in wide smiles anyway. He trades in depth. Honesty. "I love you."

"Oh." His frown vanishes, and in its place is an expression that's all shy pleasure and mild surprise. Not that she does love him, she understands. But that she would say it out of nowhere. And probably he's still not used to hearing it from anyone. "Alright."

That earns him a laugh, and he looks the smallest bit confused - but every bit as pleased - when she raises her hand to the door.

She never gets as far as knocking. Her knuckles are about to come down on that freshly painted wood when it swings inward. Standing behind it and pulling it open is a slim brunette woman with eyes that appear distantly worried, and a small, warm smile beneath them. Both features seem utterly genuine.

Those eyes - clear and keen as Rick's - flick from Beth to Daryl and back again, and as the door opens wider, the baby on her hip comes into view. Huge eyes and soft wispy hair, and it chews its fist solemnly at them, as if they're both extremely open questions and it hasn't yet made up its mind about either.

For half a breathless moment, Beth can't look away.

"Daryl. And Beth? You must be Beth."

Daryl clears his throat, and it's somewhat gratifying to know for certain that she's not the only one feeling awkward here. "Hi."

Lori - it basically has to be Lori - moves aside and inclines her head toward the house's interior. Beth catches a glimpse of a bright front hall, a staircase done in dark, glossy wood, and what might be a kitchen doorway before her focus returns, magnet-like, to the baby. She's not even sure why. It's utterly overwhelming. "Great. C'mon in. Everyone's in the living room. I have to get back to getting lunch ready."

 _Everyone._ Beth takes a slow breath, returns Lori's smile with one that feels sincere enough, and this time she's the one shadowing Daryl as he walks through the door into that completely abnormal normality that she'll never have.

And doesn't think she really wants anymore.

* * *

They are indeed all in the living room - large, bright as everything else, deeply comfortable. Rick and Michonne and Shane are occupying a wide sofa upholstered in a delicate violet pattern, Carol in an easy chair with her hands clasped over her crossed knees, and Glenn sitting on a footstool with his chin on his joined hands. As one, they raise their heads when she and Daryl enter, and something about the look that floods into their eyes makes her shiver. Not fear. Simple intensity. Same greeting as before, but also not; there's something darker in the way they all get to their feet and come forward, something somber. Daryl sets his bow and the box down out of the way by a side table, and there's the usual ritual of stroking hands and nuzzling, foreheads leaning together, intimacy that's almost painful to watch. But the grim edge along everything is still there. Clouds gathering in the far distance.

She doesn't have to look away this time. It might be that grimness. Or it might simply be that she's getting used to it.

And they're getting used to her.

Most of their attention has shifted from each other when the group breaks apart. Carol is standing close to Daryl, hand on his shoulder and the other cupping his jaw as she murmurs something to him that Beth can't hear. But the rest of them are focused on her, wolf-eyes sharp, and Rick comes to her, lowers his head. All at once there's a softness in him, one that she's seen before, and she wonders just how much he knows about the events of the last couple days.

"I'm sorry," he says quietly, and that answers that. Or some of it. "Losing family-"

"They weren't my family," she says - reflexive, and a second later she feels guilty for it. They were. She didn't know it, but they were. She didn't _like_ them, but they weren't less her blood for it. They frightened her, humiliated her, treated her like an insane child, but they died for her.

One way or another, they did.

Rick dips his chin, apparently unwilling to argue with her. Which is good, because at this point she wouldn't argue back. "Still. Finding out like that, everything it means... Can't be easy." His eyes slide down to the box and rest there. "Plus this."

"You know what it is?"

Michonne nods. "Daryl passed it along. Enough to know the basics, anyway. Gotta get a look at it to know more."

"Only one way to do that." Rick bends and lifts the box by the handles, carries it over to the sturdy wooden coffee table and sets it down. The rest of them crowd around; Rick reaches for the latch and stops just as Beth is about to issue a warning, glances back at her and gives her a thin smile.

"Guess you better do the honors?"

"It's a Drya-made box," Carol murmurs, arms crossed as she leans in closer. "Makes sense. Not any kind of sure fire defense, but every little bit helps."

Michonne looks from Shane to Rick, and briefly at Beth, dark eyes intent. "Does it have any other wards?"

"Might." Daryl has somehow returned to Beth's side without her noticing; she jumps, though calm instantly swallows it when her arm brushes his. "I didn't run into anythin', not besides the lock, but all I did was carry it. Never actually touched nothin' inside."

Shane's lips slip into a thinly amused curl. "You should probably keep takin' point then, witch-girl."

Just behind and above her left ear, Daryl growls softly - very soft, in fact, so much so that she's betting most humans standing at any distance from him would miss it, but there's no mistaking the message. _Best not talk to her that way._

But Shane actually looks a bit taken aback, and it's not hard to draw a conclusion: he hadn't meant much of anything by it. At worst, it was teasing.

She feels for Daryl's hand, squeezes it. _Down, boy._ Immediately the growl subsides and sinks into quiet, but she can sense that the place it came from is far from dormant. And indeed, he may not be able to help it. It's not a comforting idea, but it strikes her as plausible: that he'll instinctively react like that to not only any perceived danger but also any perceived disrespect or insult.

Which could be a problem, if - _when_ \- he's wrong.

But she'll worry about issues of diplomacy later. If at all.

She clears her throat and bends over the box - and as she does so, nudging her ponytail over her shoulder, she's filled with a decidedly weird air of _ceremony_ about this whole thing, as if she's occupying a role of great importance in a tremendously important situation. Once more she thinks of the baby's solemn eyes and nearly laughs.

So that helps.

It's a box. It's books. It's not _just_ either of those things, but those things do fall within the realm of those categories. She unlatches the box and pushes open the lid, steps back to allow the others to see.

For a long moment, no one says anything, and there's a frozen quality to the silence that's inescapably unsettling. Frozen beyond the silence; no one is moving. She looks at all of them and at the box, listens to the sound of silverware clinking in the kitchen, and bites her lip to keep from _demanding_ that someone fucking _say_ something already.

Then Shane does. He whistles, long and low, and shakes his head. That amused smile hasn't left him, but it's been joined by a healthy degree of bemusement. And more. Light flickering in the backs of his eyes.

He's excited.

"Goddamn." He lifts his gaze to Beth, and while he's not exactly regarding her with _respect,_ none of the scorn he initially displayed to her remains. She's noted it before, that essential lack of it, but now it's another weight rolling off her shoulders, and even in the midst of the tension she feels relief. "This is that knife all over again. You got no idea what you have here, do you?"

Rick tilts his head, brows arched. "Say none of us do."

"These are grimoires, right?" He gestures at them. "Lotta those. Always have been. No big deal. Y'all know _that._ "

"Say we all do," Michonne says dryly.

Shane continues as if he hasn't heard her. "These aren't _just_ grimoires. That one at the top? Fire. Water's next to it. I don't wanna touch 'em to check," he glances briefly at Beth, "but I'd bet all the money in my pockets the ones under there are Earth and Air. That's elemental magic. Pure Drya magic. Most of everything they knew was drawn from that."

Another growl from Daryl, this time impatience. "So?"

" _So._ " Shane doesn't try to hide his irritation, but it strikes Beth as irritation more at the interruption than at Daryl himself. Which is another step up. "These are four of the _Anwaldbec_. The Books of the Worlds. Not world." He looks up at them, and around the circle. " _Worlds._ If the Drya had anything like a Bible, you're lookin' at it right here." He releases a long breath and rakes his hands through his hair. "Part of it, anyway."

" _Gyden,_ " Glenn whispers. "So that's-"

"They said it was my birthright." The words come smooth, calm, and she doesn't have to fumble for them. Something more that she hadn't known, except she had. Just as she's known everything else. There's no hesitation in any part of her as she leans in and takes _Fyr_ in her hands. She feels the pressure of every gaze on her as she sets it on the coffee table, picks up _Waeter,_ lays it on top. Now the solid pressure of the silence is joining what's already there, but she ignores it, is long past the point of doing so almost without effort. She's looking at _Lyffc_ and _Eorth,_ and she doesn't need some kind of psychic translation ability to understand those two.

But when she picks them up, there are two more beneath.

She halts, Air and Earth still in her hands, motionless. Staring. Everyone is.

 _Ae._ And beside it: _Death._

The same word. Precisely. She wonders if that's a coincidence.

"Holy shit," Shane breathes, and he doesn't finish the second word before Glenn is jumping in - quiet.

"The hell are those?"

"Six." Rick sounds meditative, though beneath it Beth can detect the same surprise everyone else is clearly feeling. Michonne's eyes are wide, as are Carol's. And Daryl… She doesn't have to even look at him to at least roughly know what's going on in his head. "Not four." He looks up at Shane. "That's all of them. Fire, water, earth air… Life and death. Isn't it?"

Shane swallows. "All but one, yeah. That's… _Fuck_."

"It was everything for them," Daryl says softly, and all at once he's the only thing she can look at. Not the books. Not Rick or Shane or any of the others. Him and what she sees in his eyes, which she has no name for. It might be a host of things at once. "A single bloodline and some books."

Michonne shakes her head in half incredulous amazement. "Last chance to save an entire race."

"No. More than that."

None of them. The voice is low and calm and coming from the living room doorway, and when Beth turns in a single unsteady motion, Lori meets her with that same clear, keen gaze.

"They knew this was going to happen. Not just that they'd lose. All of it. End of the world and everything. That's what they were preparing for." She smiles around at all of them, drying her hands on a dishtowel. "I mean, it stands to reason. I think so, anyway. Who wants lunch?"


	41. for a mother's kind voice

**Note:** Just want to once again thank the people who are reading and commenting and generally cheerleading. You might have seen me whining about the difficulties in writing this on my blog; I want to emphasize that you shouldn't worry about me dropping it. It's just that this thing is... It's big now. It's really big. And like I've said, it's not done growing. This world just keeps getting larger and larger, and that's an exciting thing, but it's also so many balls to keep in the air at once. My fault for spinning out so many plot threads, but yes.

Anyway. Yeah. Thanks. ❤️ I think I have some cool stuff for y'all coming down the line, so hopefully the delays between updates will end up being worth it.

* * *

 **Chapter 41: for a mother's kind voice I ever will keep**

Lunch is in the dining room, a space just as bright and airy as any other part of the house Beth has been in or glimpsed. Nothing especially fancy or ornate, but a couple of glossy pieces of furniture that look like they might well be antiques, though they might just as easily not be, some simple china in a display cabinet, a long leaf-table set - with a bit of a squeeze - for eight. The meal itself is as simple as the china: roast chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, steamed green beans, rolls. But while there isn't anything overtly ceremonial about the whole setup, the sense of formality is there nonetheless, and as everyone claims chairs with Rick at one end and Lori at the other, Beth is sure.

Rick isn't just the leader. If the cyne is family, he's acting as patriarch - regardless of his age - and in truth the cyne is more than family, though that's the core of it. The heart.

This is a lord and his knights, and while it should be faintly ridiculous, it isn't at all. Goddamn _Arthurian,_ she thinks as she slides in between Daryl and Glenn, and suppresses an involuntary smile. Even if it isn't ridiculous, it's difficult to not be a little amused.

But then a hush settles over the room, and Rick releases a breath, lowers his head, and murmurs: _Eadig sy gyfu a folde. Eadig sy thoftscipe a cyne. Eadig sy leoht a ae._ And as before - and it doesn't surprise her now - the words unravel themselves in her mind.

 _Blessed be the gifts of the Earth. Blessed be the fellowship of the pack. Blessed be the light of life._

Werewolf grace. Like everything else she's heard in this language, it's flowing and strangely musical - and more, now that she understands it.

Plates start making the rounds. Not much conversation accompanies them. The whole group seems subdued, thoughtful in a way that isn't entirely comfortable, and she casts a glance at Daryl to find him looking back at her. Studying. Inquiring, though not directly of her. Checking on her, and she gives him a tiny smile as she accepts the potatoes from him, her fingertips brushing his and sending a minute shiver through both of them.

 _I'm fine._

She's not sure she is, not completely, but she can fake it. For now.

Everyone seems to be settling down into their own plates and their own meditations when she decides she'll risk breaking some unknown protocol. It's not just that the silence is becoming vaguely oppressive; yet again she's in the position of knowing the least about everything among everyone else at the table, and her tolerance for that is waning. She lowers a forkful of chicken and swings her focus from Rick to Shane, keeping her tone carefully light.

"So you said all the books _except one_ are there. What's the deal with the last one?"

Rick and Shane exchange looks, appear to come to some wordless agreement, and Shane sets his own fork down and leans forward slightly. In the periphery of Beth's vision, she catches Lori watching all three of them with sharp attentiveness, and wonders.

"No one knows anything about the last one. Not that I've ever been able to find. Not that _we've_ ever been able to find," he amends, and nods at Lori. "Me and her did a fuck-ton of research a while back, tryin' to see if we could connect anything clear between the war and what's goin' on now."

Interesting. "What'd you find?"

Lori gives her a rueful smile. "Not much. Not much solid, anyway. Lots of rumors, lots of theories. But the records left from that time are a mess, and there's a lot of stuff missing from before. We _did_ find some things about the books. Basics. What Shane said, and that there's supposed to be a seventh grimoire."

"But nothin' more than that." Shane rolls a shoulder. "Honestly, pokin' around… I got the feeling even the Drya didn't know. Not exactly. Or it was one of the best kept secrets they had."

"To be fair," Carol says, tone a bit dry, "it does seem like they had plenty of those."

Beth laughs thinly, scrapes her fork around the pool of gravy on her plate. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty much clear on that by now." Secrets and more secrets, and while she's familiar enough at this point with the reasons _why_ there were so many secrets, with why so many were kept from her and why it's such a fucking ordeal now to unearth them, that understanding hasn't been making any of it any easier, and she doesn't expect it to.

Well.

"What's the book _about,_ though? The seventh grimoire?"

"Said," Shane grunts. "Couldn't find nothin' on that except theories. Some of 'em Drya theories, which is part of why I think maybe they didn't know either. All we can say for sure is it ain't any of the four elements, and it ain't life or death."

Glenn taps his fingertips on the side of his glass. He's gazing toward the large windows that take up most of one wall, his eyes unfocused and almost dreamy. "Would have to be something important, though. Right? All six we have are. The most important things, pretty much." He looks back at all of them, focused again with a crooked little smile pulling at his mouth. "Think maybe it's _true love,_ or something like that?"

Lori shrugs. She doesn't seem to be taking it as the joke it's apparently partly meant to be. "It really could be anything.

"Shane's right. They didn't know." It doesn't feel like an uninformed assumption to her. It feels like truth, unavoidably reasonable. "If they knew, they would've told me in the letter they left me. They would at least have given me some kinda _hint._ "

Michonne leans forward, chin resting on her hands. "I agree. And it makes sense they would've said something about it if they thought it was crucial to what you do next. So while it's an _interesting_ legend-"

"-we shouldn't focus too much on it," Rick finishes. "Not for now, anyway." He frowns, scratching the side of his jaw, and as usual the movement strikes Beth as only half human at most. "What's coming at us, and when it's coming, I don't know. But Pythia wasn't shy talking about how bad it's probably gonna be. We should be assuming we don't have a lotta time. That means we have to do whatever we can to prepare." He points his fork at Beth. "Especially you."

 _Of course._ By now it's not a surprise, so it doesn't trouble her unduly. She already knew, was ready last night to move past that and on to the next step - whatever that ends up being. She draws a breath, arches a brow, and as she's opening her mouth to speak, she feels the soft brush of Daryl's hand on her thigh.

As always, it gives her a center to stand on.

"How's that gonna happen?"

"You need a teacher." Rick nods at Shane. "We got one."

Not anything _like_ the most appealing prospect she's been presented with, and she fights to keep from showing it. Her patience for diplomacy was fraying a long goddamn time ago, but it's not gone, and she doesn't think it would be at all wise to abandon it completely. But she can still question it, to a point.

"He knows enough magic? Daryl said-"

"We have no galdre. Yeah, I know that." Something flashes in Rick's eyes - something like a warning, directed at Shane and then at Daryl with an equally sharp edge, and she has time to groan internally before he speaks again. "So Daryl is gonna work with him."

* * *

The rest of the meal passes mostly without conversation, and Beth senses that any more involved discussions of what might be coming next and strategies for dealing with it aren't deemed appropriate here. Which suits her just fine; as usual, she doesn't have anywhere near enough in the way of answers, but she has enough for the moment and she's content to clear the rest of her plate in relative peace. Beside her, Daryl's silence doesn't feel particularly unhappy or sullen, which she would have expected a couple of weeks ago - less, maybe - and though she can't read Shane as well, she's not getting anything similar from him. He appears moody, his eyes distant, but he has any number of reasons to be that way.

All of them, in fact. Not speaking about everything, but thinking on it. Hard.

She's gnawing at the last bits of flesh on a wing - normally she might worry about manners but she's guessing that if there's any table at which she doesn't have to worry so much about that it's this one - when the rest of them finish in what seems like nearly coordinated unison, utensils down and focus returned and directed squarely at Rick. Not exactly expectant, but not far from it. And Rick leans his elbows on the table and folds his hands almost as if he's praying, gazing intently at the remains of the chicken. Which don't amount to much.

The sun washes through the room, soft and pale of deep autumn. From somewhere deeper in the house comes the hiccuping cry of the baby; Lori pushes back from the table with a smile and a murmured _excuse me_ and heads for the front hall. Another cry and the creak of the stairs, and it might act as a kind of starting signal, because Rick lowers his clasped hands and sighs.

"I'm supposed to have a plan, right? I don't."

"No one said that," Michonne says quietly.

Carol shakes her head, brow furrowed. "We all make a plan. Together."

"Except right now we don't have a hell of a lot to go on." Rick taps his fingertips on the tabletop, blunt nails clicking dully. Beth thinks of claws, the huge paw-hand that reality is cloaking.

She's always going to think of them that way now, she knows. That's not an unfortunate thing. Early on with Daryl, she realized it would be a very bad idea to ever forget what he is. The same goes for all of them. Even if she's stopped doubting them as allies.

"We got what Pythia said," Shane points out. "Such as it is. We got _her,_ " pointing at Beth, "and it's pretty obvious she's important, if she ain't the goddamn center. _Somethin's_ comin'. Gearin' up for a big push. Huntin' trips in wastelands and bad neighborhoods ain't gonna cut it no more."

Rick regards him in thoughtful silence for a moment - and it's difficult to gauge the quality of the thought. Some of them, Beth is learning to read. She's reasonably certain that Daryl's feelings would be lit up in neon even if he and she didn't have what they apparently have, and Glenn doesn't seem inclined to play it overly cool, nor does Shane appear to care enough to do so. But Rick is different.

 _He's afraid,_ she thinks suddenly. Or he doesn't trust himself. Doesn't trust, period. He's closed up tight, at least when it comes to some things, and it's because he believes he has to be.

The much-cliched burden of command? Or something else?

"So what're you thinking we do instead?"

"Simple. We go on the offensive, no more bullshit. We've been flailing around in the fuckin' dark. _Pythia_ was the closest thing to a solid answer we've gotten in… What, over a year now? Longer?"

"Okay, but…" Glenn looks around the table, clearly uneasy. " _How?_ It's not exactly like we can catch some Ytend and _ask_ them what's going on. Gyden, I mean… We don't even know if they can talk."

"Have you actually tried to find out?" Beth's own question surprises her, and - maybe fortunately - it's too low to rise above Shane's slightly impatient response.

"They ain't the only Alfan active around here. You know that." Responding to Glenn, maybe, but Shane hasn't taken his eyes off Rick. There's tension there, all at once but emerging as if it's been there all along, winding up beneath the surface of everything. "We can reach out to the gnomes. Cora was a good start, and there was Pan, so there's other gods in the area. I know the leeches got no love for us, but I don't think they got any for the Ytend, either."

"The _vampires?_ " Michonne stares at him, incredulous. "You're kidding. You _better_ be."

"We get in a position to be picky when I wasn't lookin'?" It's a literal snap, barely short of a snarl - and a deep growl from Rick's end of the table cuts it off just as sharply.

When he speaks, he's still quiet. But the edge of that growl remains.

"Everything's on the table right now. I don't like it either. I don't like _any_ of this. But it is what it is." Another pause, lengthy, and the tension winds down again, though it doesn't completely loosen. Beth doesn't mean to do it, doesn't think; her hand gropes for Daryl's under the table, and when she finds him and curls her fingers through his, it's the kind of anchor it's coming to reliably be. When she needs it.

He lets out a slow breath. Because of course she's the same for him.

"Shane's right," Rick says finally, and swipes a hand down his jaw. "We don't know enough. About anything. What we do know… It's not the kind of shit that helps you sleep easy. Carol." He nods at her. "Can you put out feelers?"

Carol's mouth tightens and she gives him a shrug. "I don't have any specific contacts or anything. But…" Her mouth tightens still more, into something oddly near a wry little smile. "I think almost anyone who matters knows I can operate outside some rules. I'll see what I can do."

Glenn, who's been meditatively chewing at a bit of gristle and gazing down at his plate, looks up suddenly. "What about the other cyne? I know when we tried last we came up totally empty, but it has to be worth trying again. They can't _all_ be gone."

"They probably can," Michonne says softly - darkly, and Glenn winces. "But… Yeah." She sighs. "Yeah, it's probably worth another try."

"There's one thing we do know," Shane says, and something about the quality of his voice drags every eye toward him. Softer than Michonne, but with an edge far keener than the one he had before. It's trouble, everyone already knows it, and Beth shoots Daryl a look when his hand tightens around hers. Jaw clenched, eyes narrow. He looks like he's readying himself to spring across the table.

 _Shit._

"Shane," Rick says, just as soft, but Shane ignores him.

"She _told_ us. Pythia. Why aren't we dealin' with it now?" He jerks his chin at Daryl, teeth slightly bared. "The hunters were chasin' him when we found him. They're _still_ chasin' him. That's what she said. Maybe there's somethin' you can tell us, man? Clue us in?"

"I don't know nothin'." Every word singularly controlled, spit out like a bullet between teeth that look longer and sharper than usual - and they're already long and sharp to begin with. Beth digs her thumbnail into his palm.

 _Down, boy._

"Your _brother_ was with 'em, and you're seriously tellin' us that?"

"Best believe I am, 'cause _I don't fuckin' know nothin'._ " Still controlled, but barely; he's fighting, and fighting back up toward a precipice. Beth casts a glance at Rick, half a question - _you want to do something here?_ \- but Rick is focused on Daryl, face once again impassive. "I ain't seen my brother in fifteen goddamn years. Not till I found him. They just about pumped me full of silver, ain't like I was askin' 'em for their _life story,_ so how's about you get the fuck off my back, you tight-ass _prick?_ "

"That's enough, Daryl. That's _enough._ " Rick doesn't lunge forward, but he _reaches,_ and further than Beth would have expected so quickly. His hand closes on Daryl's forearm, tight enough to whiten the knuckles, and Daryl stiffens, hisses in a breath-

And eases. Stares down at the table, jaw working.

"He told us what he knew, Shane. Back off."

"What about me?"

This time she does mean to speak. She means to very much. Because even this bullshit is dancing around something, the entire reason they're all even here, the reason sitting on the coffee table in the living room, probably a greater threat to every single one of them than any of the dark hulks she saw in her dream, pointing their guns at Daryl's head. And right now, the prospect of being in close proximity to both these men at once for any extended period of time is one of the less attractive things she's imagined recently. Which is _saying_ something.

Rick cocks his head. "What about you?"

"Shane said it, right? A lot of this is about me. Probably. So." No fear, still - as with the books, she's full of a deeper calm like a cooler current of water within a river. Rick said that it is what it is, and that's a truth as deep as her calm. Comforting, in an awful way. "What happens with me?"

"What happens with you is you _learn_." Rick's voice is almost gentle. "You do what it seems like your family meant. You study what's in those books. You figure out how to be what… what you need to be."

Carol reaches over and touches her hand. Like Rick's voice, it's not exactly gentle, but it's close. Stronger. Firm. They're not going to baby her.

She supposes she appreciates that. Has been. Will continue to do so.

"You learn how to survive," Carol says. Her eyes are deep and clear. "In the end, that's what we all do."

Beth looks down at Carol's hand - lined, strong. Elegant, in a strange way that she can't recall ever seeing in anyone else. _Survive,_ Carol says, and there's so much about these people that Beth doesn't know, so much that's only been hinted at, but when Carol says the word _survive,_ there's a weight and a density in it that's impossible to miss.

She nods.

"Alright," Rick says after another pause. "Let's call it for now. Daryl, Shane, I wanna talk to you both." His tone takes on a harder point as he starts to rise, something that stops just short of a jab. "Alone."

* * *

The rest of the pack drifts away - getting up from the table, clearing dishes and silverware, and stretching in ways that, per usual, seem like they'd be far more at home in an animal form than a human one. Beth idly imagines a circle of wolves gorged from a fresh kill, strewn around the forest floor in furry mounds. But the glance Daryl gives her as they get up together indicates anything but restfulness.

"It'll be alright." He gives her hand a squeeze, gently disentangles his own from it. And he doesn't look _troubled,_ precisely. _Pensive_ might be a better word. If uncomfortably so.

At any rate, in truth she doesn't doubt him. Doesn't doubt _it._ A lot of Rick might still be hiding beneath the lid of a very large black box, but that he cares for Daryl… That's one thing she's sure of.

That he cares for all of them.

She nods, and he lifts a hand and cups her face briefly, fingers warm and rough, and her eyes flutter involuntarily closed as a faint shiver rolls through her, chased by a flush of deep heat that she's essentially used to by now. If you can get used to wanting something so much your fucking _teeth_ ache.

It's bearable.

"I'll come find you," he murmurs, and heads silently out of the room, trailing behind Shane.

And suddenly she's alone.

It's a bizarre feeling, and for a moment she simply stands where she is with her fingers resting against the smooth curved back of the dining chair, the sun warm on her face. Unbidden and so vivid that it makes her gasp, a realization comes to her - that she's been avoiding. Blocking. Understandably.

This room isn't at all unlike the dining room at the farm. Smaller, and the furniture is a good bit newer, but it's the same brightness, white walls, dark wood, everything washed in sun. It hurts her like her own heart punching at the inside of her breastbone, and she lets out a long, shaky breath and rubs her hands down her face.

She has to let go. But she's never going to be able to. Not completely.

 _Is that so bad, Bethy? I know it hurts, but… Is that really so bad? Would it really be better to forget?_

She turns away from the table and wanders over to the window, laying her fingertips against the glass. It's clean, and leaving a handprint on it seems rude, but something about the way the sun is hitting it makes it appear to glow with its own source of light, like a membrane rather than a translucent pane. Something that might give if she pressed against it. She could tear through, and pass from one world into yet another. Endless worlds, stacked one on top of the other, rising higher and higher.

Like the levels of a tower.

"Can't be who I was, Daddy," she whispers. "Can only be who I am."

But no. She doesn't really think it would be better.

* * *

Rick, Daryl, and Shane are nowhere in evidence. The others seem to have returned to the living room; Beth can hear low conversation, too quiet to make out the words. The sensible move would be to join them, even if all she does is sit in silence, but she remains in the front hall, head cocked, listening. Past the voices, and past the grating of a passing car in serious need of a new muffler.

Again and very softly from upstairs, the fussing of a baby. Then, even softer, a woman singing.

By the time Beth realizes she's climbing the stairs, she doesn't care enough to stop herself.

The second floor looks and feels smaller than the ground floor, though the hall in which she finds herself is just as bright, floor all pale wood with a light blue carpet running its length. To her immediate left is what appears to be a bathroom, and further on to the right is a closed door bearing a sign that reads CARL. The letters are in a bright yellow surrounded by green foliage, and a buck curls its neck around the outer curve of the C, eying the armed hunter peering around the edge of the L with profound wariness.

At the end of the hall, another door stands partway open, and a shadow moves across the light streaming through it.

The singing is louder. Low, and very sweet. Beth pauses, hand gripping her opposite arm, teeth working at her lip. Part of her is wishing she'd stayed downstairs.

 _in the bright sunny south and peace and content_  
 _these days of my boyhood I scarcely have spent_  
 _from the deep flowing spring to the broad flowing stream_  
 _ever dear to my memory, sweeter is my dream_

She doesn't want her lips to be moving. But they are. No voice behind them, only a breath and not very much of one, but her mouth remembers the shapes of the words, and that she hates every one of them for their place in her memory doesn't stop that memory from passing through her.

 _I lay my confinement and comfort of life_  
 _the dangers of warfare, provision and strife_  
 _I have come to come close and reply with my word_  
 _as I shoulder my musket, but I'll take my sword_

 _my father looked sad as he bid me to part_  
 _my mother embraced me with anguish of heart_  
 _and my beautiful sister looked pale in her woe_  
 _as she hugged me and blessed me, told me to go_

Her mother singing it in the kitchen. Doing any number of things; cooking, dishes, washing apples from the tree outside or tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. Sitting at the table and reading. Her mother and Maggie - and this might be the product of her imagination, a memory manufactured in part to torture herself and in part to fill some bone-deep need, but either way, it's there, and it chokes her heart.

She blinks. At some point she started forward, and now she's standing in the doorway with her hand on the frame, staring at Lori silhouetted in the light of the window, the baby lying against her shoulder. A muttering sigh, then silence beneath the singing.

She should go. She shouldn't be here. This isn't her place. She should go back downstairs and try to forget she was ever here - because this might actually be something it would be good to forget. Let go of.

But then Lori is turning, giving her a small smile - small but utterly genuine, and it's too late.

"Hi, honey." Lori inclines her head. "C'mon in."

For a moment Beth doesn't move. Can't. Not into the room, not back down the damn hall and down the damn stairs where she still half believes she should go, even with this invitation. But there's something about the room - not the master bedroom, she sees, but a small nursery done in shades of light blue and green and yellow, sky and grass and sun - that's tugging at her the way Lori's voice did, and all at once she finds herself stepping over that invisible threshold and into the brightness, just as the baby's head lifts and a thin, grumpy cry slips from that tiny mouth.

Lori sighs - not unhappily - and turns to face Beth more directly. "She's been fussy in the afternoons, past few weeks."

"How old is she?"

"A little over seven months."

Lori watches her approach with keen attention, eyes glittering with interest, and it occurs to Beth that she's being _seen_ here with all the clarity that almost everyone downstairs would be capable of. This is a human woman, fully… but she's also somehow more than that.

Is this what happens? After? Did Lori change, after her own _Edness a Sawol?_

Is this a version of her own future, if that future includes life?

"She's beautiful," Beth whispers. And she is. Her face hasn't lost its expression of infant-annoyance, the kind of petulant irritation that only babies seem to possess, but even that's beautiful in its way, the delicacy of how small she is, the robust core Beth can practically feel, the blaze of life inside her.

Human, also, Daryl said. Not Hathsta herself.

Yet that can't be all.

Beth's gaze flicks up to Lori's face, and Lori is smiling again, glancing down. "Want to hold her?"

 _Oh._

As before, she's frozen. Her limbs, her chest, her jaw. Her eyes. The baby whimpers and rubs clumsily at her nose with a curled hand, and before Beth can find a way to break her paralysis, Lori is holding the baby out to her and she's accepting, taking the warm, perfect little weight and gathering her close to her chest, her throat - both of which remain locked totally in place. She can't even breathe.

She blinks and the baby huffs a sigh, loosens against her, and suddenly she can move.

"Judith," Lori says quietly, and Beth mouths the name. Her face is so close to the top of Judith's head, that unique and uniquely wonderful Clean Baby Smell filling her nose, and on pure instinct, she begins to rock her.

A few wordless minutes, and a baby falling asleep in her arms.

"You're good with her," Lori murmurs.

"I always wanted a child."

The trembling honesty is involuntary, rising from beneath her hitching breastbone, and Lori nods. "But it's different now. Isn't it?"

Beth twitches her head up - seconds later hoping the movement didn't alarm Judith. But Judith only sighs and relaxes further. "What… What d'you mean?"

"It's not hard to see. Rick didn't even need to tell me." Lori gestures at the door with her chin, and presumably the house beyond. "You and Daryl. If you're wanting him like that, you're wanting this too. And you're wanting it in a way you never did before." Something flickers behind her eyes, something distant - something painful. "Even if you wanted to, you can't help it."

No. "No." Beth squeezes her eyes closed. Part of her - not a small part - doesn't want to hear this right now. Doesn't want to know what she already knows. Because mating with him is one thing - even if it's a huge thing - but then there's _this_. "I can't. I can't help any of it."

"This isn't such a great time to fall in love, honey." Lori raises a hand, strokes the back of Judith's head and smooths the wisps of her hair. "It's an even worse time to want to start a family. But that's how it goes." Her smile turns a touch wry. "And he's not the most _housebroken_ man out there, but I think he's a good one."

Beth laughs. There's a kind of relief in it, perhaps in simply being able to do so, because even if this room is bright - with its shelf of books and baby toys and its crib and the dancing mobile of flying birds turning slowly above - a darkness has crept in around the edges. Lori is right. The timing of everything could be a fuck of a lot better.

Then again, maybe it couldn't.

"He loves me."

"Of course he does. That's pretty easy to see, too."

Lori leans back against the windowsill, half sits, and merely watches her for another moment or two, watches them both, and clasps her hands between her thighs. Once more Beth meets her eyes, and now what she sees there is a kind of sadness that wrenches at her - the sadness of someone watching someone else stumbling, falling headlong, and knowing nothing can be done to stop it.

"No one can walk you through this." Lori releases a breath and lowers her head, seems to be focused on her hands. "Even when there were more of them - of _us,_ the people who're bound to them - I think this was something we always had to do on our own. With _them,_ sure… But also on our own. What's expected of us, what having children means. _Will it be human. Will it be Hathsta._ There's a hell of a lot at stake just between two people. More than there ever should have been."

She pauses, then looks up. She's strong, through the sadness and that distant pain, and the strength is abruptly difficult to look at. Not just the intensity of it, and the nakedness, the way it's utterly unhidden.

It's difficult to look at because of what Beth senses it cost her.

"Maybe Rick hasn't said this yet, so I will. I guess maybe…" She shakes her head, glances briefly away. Her smile is lingering around the corners of her mouth, endlessly complex. Not too far from a grimace. "It's not like it's formal, but maybe it's my place. Or something like that. Beth… You're part of a family. Even if you haven't mated with him yet, you already are. I don't think you really had a choice about that, and I'm sorry. But you're not alone. Not now, not ever. Not as long as a single one of us survives."

Beth stares at her. She can't summon up anything else. Can't think of anything that might fit. _Yes_ feels ridiculous. _Thank you_ feels both ridiculous and hopelessly inadequate. And she's not certain this is something for which anyone should be thanked. It's not like a favor was done for her.

This - Daryl and the cyne and the magic sleeping inside her and the all-consuming desire burning in her core - is wonderful and terrible in equal measure, and even if she knew it before, it weighs heavier on her now.

Warm and heavy and solid in her arms. Sleeping for the present.

But stirring.

* * *

 **Additional Note:** The song Lori is singing is "Bright Sunny South", which is a beautiful old Confederate ballad. I have slightly mixed feelings about it, given where it comes from, but a) it really is beautiful (my version of choice is of course the Sam Amidon version, which is utterly gorgeous) and b) I think lyrically it's actually a really good fit for what's going on in the story in some ways.


	42. the color of an eye

So the good news is that I have the next block of plot pretty well planned out, and the semester is over, and both of those things mean I'll probably be able to write a bit faster. I'll do my best, anyway.

Another couple of news items. First: I'm not going to wait until this is finished to put together a book version of it. This feels way more like a comic/TV series to me, and unlike just about every multichapter thing I've ever written, I have no idea when it will end. I frankly think it could continue almost indefinitely. My one hope is that I'll have the sense to end it before it starts to suck, because everything does if you let it go long enough.

So yeah, watch for Howl: Volume 1, probably coming in the next couple of months.

The second news item is that since I've done some musing **(dynamicsymmetry dot tumblr dot com / post / 145217408726 / fanworks-and-patronage-and-me)** (jesus fuck ff dot net can you please join us in 2016 and allow hotlinking) about patronage and gift economies at Wiscon, I have a now **( dot com / user?ty=h &alert=1&u=136106).** So if you enjoy this story, if you want to support it and the other fandom work I do, please consider tossing a buck or two my way. And if you don't want to do , there's always the Keep Singing podcast tip jar **(keepsingingpodcast dot wordpress dot com)**

 _ **(JESUS FUCKING CHRIST YOU WRETCHED FUCKING WEBSITE IT'S 20 FUCKING 16 WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKING FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM)**_

Anyway.

Regardless of anything and everything, thank you so much for reading. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 42: the color of an eye, the glory of a sudden view**

She's downstairs and sitting on the porch steps when Daryl comes out to her.

No one is with him. When she looks up at him, at the set of his mouth and eyes, she perceives weariness and no small amount of irritation, but the irritation itself is weary. He's resigned. She can guess what to.

She can also guess at least some of what the conversation with Shane and Rick consisted of. That given what they're both being tasked with, they'd best behave themselves. Or else. Or else what? She can't imagine Rick getting violent with them as any form of discipline - has seen firsthand that he doesn't. He's a leader, clearly not a dictator, clearly no desire to be one. But she's also gleaned the sense from Daryl that the consequences of disobeying Rick are a particular kind of unpleasantness.

And she thinks of the consequences of disobeying _her._ If he even could. What that might do to him, even if she did nothing at all.

One thing that still crawls discomfort into her gut.

He glances up at the bike, down at her. "You wanna get goin'?"

It's early afternoon. In fact, if nothing else grabs her and demands her time, she can in theory go to work. The possibility is bizarre, and for more than one reason - and there are other things. She looks over her shoulder at the door. "What about the books?"

"Rick wants to keep 'em for now. They'll be safe enough here. Shane's gonna take a look at 'em with Lori."

"She knows a lot about that stuff?" Perhaps it shouldn't be strange to her, but it is, and it occurs to her that Lori is the first _human_ member of this pack - this _family_ \- that she's met. The implications of that aren't something she's given a lot of thought to. Not before now.

Daryl's mouth quirks in faint, dry amusement. "You think she'd just hang out and do apocalypse bake sales?" He shrugs. "She wasn't gonna sit around while Rick did everythin'. She's smart and she wanted to help."

"Does that happen a lot? With… mates? They get involved?"

"They _are_ involved," Daryl says quietly, and though there's no reproach in his tone, somehow she feels reproached. It was a stupid question.

She should know.

Yes, she does want to get going. Very much so. Because of everything, and because there's a baby upstairs who is making her feel things she has no idea how to handle at the moment.

She gets to her feet, halfway up taking his hand when he offers it. Big and thick and warm, like always, and the way her fingers fit between his returns her center to her.

She wonders if he truly understands how much he helps her.

"Yeah. I wanna go." She considers a moment. "I need to get another phone. And I guess I can go to work. Can you take me?"

"You want me to chauffeur you around, girl?" Before she can respond he smiles again, a little wider, and there's a warmth in it that matches what thrums like a heartbeat in his palm. "I got nothin' else to do."

As if he wouldn't take her wherever she wanted to go, for as long as she wanted him with her. As if it wouldn't make him happy beyond happiness to do so. One day she'll fully internalize the fact that this isn't a chore for him. This is not coercion. This is not _slavery,_ and it's unfair to call it that. It's _ugly_ to call it that. Whether it's instinct or neurology or free will, or most likely some incredibly complex combination of all three, this is nothing he doesn't want.

This is everything he wants.

"Thanks," she says softly, gives his hand a squeeze, and that familiar shiver of pleasure passes through him.

 _Have I pleased you?_ God, if only he could understand that too.

If only he could understand how much.

* * *

It doesn't take long to get another phone.

She doesn't have to specify what she's thinking of; naturally he knows perfectly well and takes her to a cheap hole in a grimy wall specializing in equally cheap phones, prepaid and without contracts. It's dim in there and smells very strongly of sickly-sweet lemon scented cleaner, and when Daryl walks in behind her she turns around in time to see him hesitate and wrinkle his nose. There's something faintly comical about it, and she bites back a laugh, leaves him near the door and goes to complete the transaction.

As quickly as possible. She doesn't like the smell either - though for him it must be overwhelmingly intense.

The middle-aged balding man behind the counter barely looks at her as he rings her up, and that's just as well. She's feeling overloaded by the world and minimizing her contact with people is preferable at the moment, especially since when she goes to work it's going to be pretty much unavoidable, and she's just about to take her bag and go when the man raises his head and _does_ look at her.

He appears as normal as her first impression of him was - for the most part. But as he catches and holds her gaze, she can now see that his ears are unnaturally large and long, and his irises are an extremely pale yellow. The yellow is inhuman enough, but the paleness is what kicks it over the edge, and she swallows and steps back, thin black plastic bag forgotten in one hand even as it whispers to her.

He looks inhuman because he's not human. She's certain.

The focus of those pale eyes flicks past her and lands on what must be Daryl, and as she glances at him, his lips pull back from his teeth. Not a significant amount, a snarl, but she recognizes it as a display. A casual warning to the thing, mostly devoid of any real aggression.

 _Don't try anything._

She swings her gaze around. The thing rolls a shoulder and appears to drift back into its bored distraction. She doesn't hesitate any longer; she heads swiftly for the door, pushing it open with a soft jangle that nevertheless jars her, and lets out a breath when it shuts behind her.

Daryl moves ahead of her, rummaging in his pocket for his keys, but she touches his arm. "What the hell was _that?_ "

Her bestiary keeps growing.

"Duende," he says, and he sounds entirely unconcerned. "South America originally. They pretty much keep to themselves, but." He looks down at her and shrugs. "You're you. I ain't takin' chances."

Reasonable. Inasmuch as anything is. If he's not worried she won't be either, however freaked out she was a minute ago. She nods, and as he swings a leg over the bike and slides the key into the ignition, she stuffs the bag into the pocket of her jacket and climbs on behind him.

The bike is comforting now. It feels like safe haven, like a mobile fragment of his den. It probably is, to some extent. Probably he took care to make it that way.

The world keeps getting weirder. It also keeps getting more dangerous. But the number and power of these havens is also increasing. And she's understanding them better and better.

And he's going to teach her. Make her an even more fundamental part of everything. Give her the tools to change it as it suits her, and make her will into a meaningful thing.

Flutter in her stomach. She's looking forward to it. Finally some control.

She lays her head between his shoulderblades and releases a sigh as he carries them away.

* * *

First call she makes - as they pull into the gas station's lot - is to Axel, and she only questions the oddness of calling him when he's a few yards away after he's picked up and she's climbing off the bike and giving him a wave through the door. She questions what she's doing, and she understands, and she's bemused. Pleasantly so.

She's surprising him. The kind of surprise that's almost a present. He's been stressed about this, strained by her chronic absence, and he's been way the hell more patient with her than most bosses would be. He's known from the beginning that she was running from something, figuratively if not literally, and he's inclined to do her favors, not because he enjoys ogling her - okay, maybe it's that a tiny bit - or he expects something in return but simply because he _likes_ her.

So she's going _Hey, look, you weren't wrong to trust me. You gave me a chance and I'm coming through._

It feels good to do that. It's the kind of thing she used to do a lot more.

It's the kind of thing she used to have a lot more people to do it for.

She turns back just as she reaches the door, ready to tell Daryl that it'll probably be weird if he hangs around in the place for hours, what with how small it is and how suspicious he looks, though he can if he wants, but he hasn't gotten off the bike, nor has he cut the engine. He gives her a nod and starts to pull away, and he doesn't have to explain for her to get it.

He'll be around. He's going to keep her in sight every second. But he's going to do what he's demonstrated the ability to do more than once, and fade into the background, as if slipping another level into the world behind the veil. Be there without necessarily being seen.

She's as safe as she would be with mere inches between them.

She's smiling to herself as she pulls the door open, and then she's smiling at Axel, and yes. Things do feel good. Just about everything.

Easy to believe everything will be okay.

* * *

And at least for the hours of her shift, it is.

Nothing much happens. That's more than fine. The normal kind of crowd, the loud kids and the moderately creepy taxi drivers, a couple of rough looking bikers who nevertheless behave themselves. And the regular people. Nondescript. Nothing to set them apart, and she forgets them about five minutes after they leave.

No vampires or gnomes or gods or _duende._ Or if there are any, if anyone comes in who isn't strictly human, they're camouflaged well enough that she doesn't notice. So same difference.

Except part of her knows this is just delaying the inevitable. Leaning on the counter, night well-fallen outside and the lights over the pumps casting a strange sharp glow over everything, she traces one of the symbols from the books on the glass with her fingertip. She doesn't remember which grimoire it's from, has no idea what it means - though apparently she eventually will - and she shouldn't be able to see the swoops and lines, but she can. Almost invisible, but when she tilts her head it's there, like smears of skin oil. Except it's not skin oil.

It's glowing. Nothing like the pump lights. As she gazes down at it, she thinks of the kind of luminescent algae that's supposed to grow on the walls of caves - or she thinks she recalls seeing something about that on TV once, some nature show - and she thinks about how she's never been in a real cave, not even a touristy one on vacation, would have no idea what to do in one, and all over again how out of her element she still is sweeps through her like a stiff autumn wind.

It's not that she has no power. It's that she has _a fuck of a lot of power_ and she doesn't have the first clue about how to use it.

Sure, she'll learn. In the meantime…

The door swings open and she looks up. It's Stalin, clothes rumpled and dark hair tousled and eyes sleepy - more than sleepy. Reddish at the edges. His approach is heralded by a gentle cloud of pot smoke.

He gives her a lazy smile, which she returns. She doesn't exactly _like_ him, but aside from being chronically late to relieve her, he's always seemed okay. And anyway, she's retained her good mood.

She doesn't know exactly what's going to happen next, but it's almost certainly going to involve Daryl, and it might not involve an overabundance of stress or lethal danger. Not if he can help it. Especially since he's probably every bit as eager as she is to grab what downtime he can.

She wonders when her _lessons_ are set to begin. She might ask him. She might not. She might not want to think about it.

God, she really just likes the idea of going back to one of their places and going to bed. She doesn't even care a tremendous amount about whether or not sleeping ends up being involved. The once-desperate need for him still isn't especially desperate, and she hasn't detected any indication that it's that way for him either.

She steps out from behind the counter, jacket in her hands, slides smoothly past Stalin and turns to give him half a wave. He cocks his head, his lazy smile growing quizzical, because she's usually not so friendly with him, but whatever. She owes him no kind of explanation. It's enough that she wants to.

Her hand is on the bar of the door when she glances down at it and catches the light dancing around her fingertips, softer than the tail of a firefly. It doesn't freak her out. Doesn't even feel all that weird.

This is who she is.

She steps out into the night and he melts out of the shadows with his eyes glittering, and her glowing fingers thread with his like the deepest instinct as she pushes up on her toes to kiss him.

And like before, he carries her away.

* * *

She's not surprised when he doesn't take them in either the direction of home or the direction of his den. It's early in the night, relatively - not even ten - and she's pleasantly tired but not sleepy. There's a dreamy quality to her alertness as it passes over the speed-streaks of headlights and streetlights, the neon of store windows alternately garish and ghostly. She doesn't know how fast they're going, and in fact it occurs to her that she usually isn't sure. On Daryl's bike, movement takes place along a blurry spectrum between Slow and Fast, and Fast might be anywhere from around sixty miles an hour to around…

God, it might be anything. It's already clear that physics has only a tangential hold on them like this. On _it_. He weaves effortlessly through the heavier traffic closer to downtown and no one honks, skids, swerves out of the way. No one actually seems aware of their presence.

 _Reality_ is so much deeper than she ever knew. Sometimes it makes her want to scream. Now it makes her want to toss her head back and laugh, and she indulges herself, hair streaming behind her.

At some point she realizes where he's taking them, and this isn't a surprise either, though it's not what she would have guessed. The streets are broader, brighter, a long, dense line of trees to their left, and she gazes ahead of them at the towers and half-slips back to that day, a good day, one of the best she's had with him, and how it ended was so good too.

His finger in her cunt, kneeling between her legs and working her with both hands, lifting her up and sending her flying into an orgasm that made her wail. Rapt. Awed by the sheer force of the pleasure he was giving her. Awed to the point of joining her.

He was lost in love with her then, never would have done that with her if he wasn't, and she should have seen it for what it was. But hey, better late than never. She smiles against the leather of his jacket.

It's only when he turns them off the street and onto the drive that leads to the entrance that she realizes a potential problem - though she also realizes that it's likely if not probable that it won't actually be a problem for him. The Botanical Garden isn't exactly a 24-hour outfit, and ahead of them a heavy set of wrought-iron gates stand closed. Definitely locked. Almost definitely they're also contending with a security system.

She's not concerned, as he pulls them to a stop and cuts the engine. She's curious.

He glances over his shoulder at her, wordless as he climbs off the bike and moves smoothly toward the gate like a piece of the Scead come loose and made sentient. She follows, once more bemused, because that glance was all the beckoning he needed to do.

She comes to a halt beside him and crosses her arms, scanning the gate up and down. "So what's the plan?"

He shoots her another glance and his teeth flash in the briefest of smiles as the light makes those lovely mirrors of his eyes. "We break in."

"Yeah, I kinda figured. How?"

He reaches out. "Gimme your hand."

She extends her hand without hesitation, and as she does and the trees whisper dryly overhead, she understands suddenly that her _lessons_ are beginning now. Maybe not in any formal way, maybe not in the way he and Shane will conduct them together, but he means to teach her how to do something. And all at once she's more than merely curious.

She's excited.

He takes her hand in his, gently arranges it so it's spread wide and lays it against the cool iron of the gate, complex and abstract forms under her palm. Nice, and even if it's cool she would swear she can feel it vibrating.

The rest of the city is lit up behind them, but here, now, it's as if they're traveling away from it even if they haven't yet entered the Scead. Possibly it's her imagination. But she knows better than to be sure of that.

"Magic can do a lot," he murmurs. He's standing very close, heat pouring off of him, and she shivers as his calloused thumb sweeps across her knuckles. "You'll be able to do more with it than I ever could. Fuck of a lot more." For a second his tone is almost sad, and she's opening her mouth to say something about it when he continues. "You can go beneath the surface, some parts of the world. Small parts. Make 'em do what you want. Move things around like you couldn't before."

She nods. Makes sense, and matches everything she's seen so far. "So we're gonna unlock this."

"You're gonna unlock it."

"Alright." She curls her fingers between his, squeezes. This is all she wanted. This is perfect. "Tell me how."

But he doesn't answer immediately. He's quiet, everything around and about him as warm and soft as his fur, and she can sense him collecting something within himself. She doesn't know what, and she doesn't have to know. She simply waits, until he speaks again.

"Your hand is how you do shit to the world anyway. You don't need it for magic, not all magic, but it helps you focus. Helps you if you can touch what you wanna change. Thing about touchin' is they say you never actually _touch_ anythin'. There's always this tiny space between your atoms and whatever's under your fingers."

She arches a brow at him. This sounds more than a little ridiculous. " _Who_ says?"

He shrugs dismissively. "Scientists. Or whatever."

"Yeah, they say a lot." She gives his fingers another squeeze and offers him a teasing smile. "How the hell do you know what scientists say?"

Once this might have sounded and felt like an insult to him. Once it might have hurt. But he only gives her a Look, and under it she can see amiable amusement. "I know a lotta stuff, girl."

"I know." The gentle teasing leaves her smile and it's simply gentle. He does. He knows so much more than anyone would ever guess, looking at him. Maybe someday she'll be able to do more than him, but until then there seems to be no end to what he can teach her. About everything. "Keep goin'."

"They're right. You can't _really_ touch nothin'. But they're also wrong. There's more in the world than atoms." He presses her hand more firmly against the iron. "The lines between everythin' are blurrier than most people get. You're not just touchin' this. You're _inside_ it, just a little. You'd never notice it. But if you can do magic, it's enough.

"So you want this thing unlocked. There's an alarm system, so you'd want that gone too. You can get into both, 'cause you're _already_ in both."

"Okay…" She hesitates, eyes falling half closed. Feeling. She doesn't doubt what he says. She has no reason to do so. Once again, it matches everything she's seen and learned since this all began. But even if it's true… "So what do I _do_ with that? Is there some kinda word I need to say?"

He shakes his head. "Not always. Words aren't important themselves. There's nothin' in the Reord a Bealu does shit on its own."

"Then why does it exist?"

"Words focus. They collect. They're like… I dunno, maybe like batteries. Not exactly, but kinda. Maybe more like what you can do with a magnifying glass and the sun." He nods at the gate. "You could probably get strong enough that you wouldn't need any words to get this thing open. But right now you need to have one." Slowly, as if he's trying not to dislodge something, he removes his hand from hers. "Think about you and it. Think about how you're connected to it, like how I said."

She huffs a laugh. This isn't quite what she expected it to be like. He's not handing her a spell, not giving her a string of arcane phrases to utter or symbols to draw. This is at once so much simpler and so much more complicated, and while she still doesn't doubt him, the disparity between her imagining of what's happening and the thing itself strikes her as bizarrely funny.

"You sound like some sorta Jedi master, tellin' me to _use the Force_."

She glimpses the corner of his mouth twitching into a smile, and he shrugs, folding his arms across his chest. "If that helps."

Okay.

She closes her eyes - not something he said she should do, but it seems like a good move - and focuses her attention on the iron, the iron that she both is not and is more than touching. The iron… And smaller. Deeper. Those atoms that never touch, yes, but he said there was _more,_ and she might very well have it totally wrong, but she imagines that line between her skin and the metal literally blurring, her hand bleeding into it and it bleeding into her, and she thinks about her blood, about the iron literally _in_ her, and how like calls to like. How something shared is in itself connection.

And she feels it move.

Hardly at all. Fully half of her is positive that her imagination went a step too far. But what she's feeling now isn't like anything else her imagination has conjured up, even on its strongest days. It's indescribable, a slow tingle that isn't a tingle at all, a humming that rides through the metal and into the core of her palm, up her arm to settle in her heart and from there to vibrate into her brain. And it's not just the iron anymore; she can sense the security system too, the rolling sparks of electricity in its network of wires, and even the stuff she knows must be far away from her is so near. The rolling sparks in her brain, leaping from synapse to synapse, dancing along the pathways of her nerves. Out of her fingertips and conducted into those wires, whispering to them, soothing them to sleep. Darkening them one by one like stars going out.

Daryl's voice is a breath warm against the back of her neck, his lips brushing her ear. Giving her the last thing she needs.

 _Onlucan._

Her tongue, her teeth. Her own lips. The shape of the syllables as she sends them across the connection, glowing as she forms them. Brightening as they charge. Too brilliant for her to look at, surging, a _flare._

With a low creak, one side of the gate swings wide.

She doesn't know when her eyes opened, but they're open now, and she blinks at the place under her hand where half the gate no longer is. Above her, the conversation of the trees is close to chattering as their branches click together.

"Seldlic," Daryl breathes from behind her, and she half turns, her hand still upraised, looking back at him. His eyes are shining, and an odd smile is tugging at his mouth. Even in the dimness she has no trouble reading his expression - pleasure, no small amount of wonder, and something more. In the most uncondescending way possible, he's proud of her.

She understands him, because now she can. But she would be able to anyway. It's simple, and yet as words sometimes do, it contains worlds.

 _Good._

* * *

Naturally the grounds aren't fully dark. Lamps line the drive and shimmer off the surface of the lake as they pass it. The lake itself is nearly motionless, its surface glassy, only the smallest ripples breaking the fall of the light. The dreamy quality of Beth's attention has not only returned but expanded somehow, as if the connection that allowed her to unlock the gate hasn't faded. As if it extends to everything moving by, the pavement under the wheels.

Him.

The white pillars of the event halls rise like carved bone, windowpanes shimmering like the surface of the lake. To her they look like the windows in Rick and Lori's dining room did, like membranes she could push through and into somewhere else. She's staring at them as Daryl pulls to a halt in a wide circle at the end of the drive and the bike's engine growls into silence, staring as he gets off and touches her shoulder, offering her a hand although she doesn't need it. Need isn't the point here, and as she emerges from her trance and flicks her gaze from his hand to his face, that ever-present desire wells up in her.

She's beginning to truly grasp the degree to which this double bond works in both directions. She would go anywhere with him, her trust seated in her marrow. Not just that he would protect her, but that they would protect each other.

They have so far. Every time.

She knows where he's taking her now. Scared the shit out of her before, but it was so terribly beautiful, and then he had taken her for the simple reason of showing her something beautiful.

The gate was a lesson. But in this moment she's positive that school's out.

She takes his hand, climbs off the bike, and together they walk down the path to the green leafy goddess fountain. And when he carves the symbols that open the Night Gate and that starry tear in reality, she follows him through.

It's as cold as she remembers. But this time she's ready for it. She's also ready for the push through the thick, dark foliage, the leaves slapping at her neck and cheeks, lifting her hands to push them aside. And it may be another trick of her imagination, but it seems to her that they part more easily for her, though not as easily as they do for him, and her emergence into shockingly open air and the violent end of the world isn't nearly as shocking.

But it's still a shock. She suspects it would be no matter how often she came here, because standing at the edge of a precipice and looking down at the seething, churning all-color light that is the cradle of countless other universes, the rhythmic rising and sinking of their planet-like forms, the gentle pull it exerts on her as if calling her to swan dive into it…

There's no fucking way that's ever going to be anything but borderline incomprehensible. She gazes down at it and she can't process. It's too big. It's too awful. It's too beautiful. She's seeing something that her mind, however capable it is, was never made to grasp.

He still has her hand. She forgot, but then he squeezes and it's like an anchor. She sighs and leans against his side, and like the first time here, the heat of him envelops her and forces back the chill.

She doesn't have to ask why he brought her here. Sometimes this is the kind of thing you simply need to see. A reminder that they're so tiny in the face of all of this, and not in a bad way, and that everything is more wonderful than they can understand. A multiverse of wonders, in the face of which the decay and death of a single world is no catastrophe

Except even if that's true, she looks at this now and she can't escape the feeling that something at its heart is _wrong._ Can't perceive it, can't pinpoint it, but it's in the deepest part of her, her heart responding to its own.

The dark pillar of Anwaldtur, and the tiny crimson figure on its balcony.

"We can't save it, can we?" she whispers, her voice somehow audible over the wind rising from the sea of light, soaring up to meet the mirror-sea of stars.

"No." Just as soft. Calm and sure.

"Our part of it?"

"Maybe." Silence for a moment. Again, he squeezes her hand, and it feels bigger curled around hers. It _is_ bigger. He's on the verge of changing, and she isn't going to command him to, and she sure as shit isn't going to tell him to stop. He doesn't need her permission for it, and he'll know it. And he'll do it at his own pace, in his own time.

He's not even doing it consciously, not entirely. He's releasing the hold he keeps on himself. Loosening his grip on his own leash.

"We've come a long way from you helpin' me with my family, huh?" She's amused. But also a kind of melancholy is washing through her. The horror of it was so much larger than she realized, so much more complicated, and it's not going to end. It's only weaving itself more densely around her, a trapping web, and she'll never get out.

And she doesn't really want to. He's in here with her.

"You sorry I did?"

His voice is a low, grating rumble, lower than usual - that changing as well. She wishes she could curl into it, draw it up over herself like a blanket. She smiles at the image. "Of course not." Pause. "Are you?"

"Toldja." Raising his head, his bones beginning to crack. She turns her face toward him, watching, breathless as she always is as every cell in her blood sings for him. "Had no honor before this. Had nothin'. Even with the cyne, it wasn't much. Now…" He releases a huge breath, the size to match his expanding lungs, as dark fur begins to ripple across his skin. "Thu sy min arweor."

 _You are my honor._

Slowly he lifts himself into the night, filling the air with his own body. Then, barely finished, he drops to the ground and bends at the elbows, lowering the front half of his body in something like a bow.

A couple of seconds and she gets it. She buries her fingers in his fur and grips great soft handfuls of it, uses it to steady herself as she clambers onto his back. He waits, all quiet patience, until she's settled herself, before he rises, still on all fours, and pads silently off along the edge of the world.

She doesn't know how long he carries her. Time here has also lost its form, and more profoundly than she's felt elsewhere except for the Benescead. It doesn't matter; she's still not sleepy, though her weariness hasn't left her, and she thinks she would probably be content to stay like this for hours, her head between his huge shoulderblades like a surreal remix of riding behind him on the bike, watching universes dip and roll beneath. The beat of his heart is deafening, pounding into her ear and jaw, and yet it's also as quiet as the rest of him when he's this way, when he's more utterly himself than he is at any other time. The roar of the air as it rushes in and out of his lungs, tidal. Pulled by the gravity of the life inside him.

She's still entranced by it when he stops, and it takes her a minute to realize that he has. She raises her head and sees a pile of big, smooth boulders ahead of them - resembling the boulders they sat on the first time here, though she's pretty sure they aren't the same ones. Without being prodded to do so, she hops down and stretches, moves toward them and begins to climb to the highest one. She senses him behind her, his power and warmth and the way he occupies the space around him, the click and scratch of his claws on the rock.

She reaches the top seconds before him and stands, unafraid. The surface of the top boulder is wide and flat, almost like a platform, though nothing about it indicates that it was purposefully made that way. She's steady, unwavering in the face of a fall that would do unimaginable things to her - probably all of them horrible and most likely extremely lethal - and she remains there until she knows he's settled behind her. Without looking over her shoulder she steps back and sinks into his lap, and he wraps his arms around her, enfolding her so completely that she feels nearly cocooned.

And for a long while neither of them says anything.

As always when he's like this, that desire in her has both compressed and grown, dense and hot as a young star, and she's wet, soaking through her panties, and he must be able to scent it. How much she wants him, what she would give him, what she _will_ give him, and the strength of the decision is acting as an accelerant, the flames leaping higher and licking up her walls like his tongue. It's him too, cock swelling at her back, nudging against her and throbbing with his own heat, and she knows it could be now. It could happen now. She could strip herself and fall onto her hands and knees, shove her ass into the air, and he would clasp her and loom over her and thrust into her, snarling, teeth bared against her shoulder and their points digging into her flesh, her palms and knees scraped as he pounded her into the rock. And it would be so fucking good.

But it's not time.

So desperate to make it happen, _let_ it happen, both of them, and now that they've decided that it will she's overwhelmed by the conviction that it's not time and it shouldn't happen yet.

She can't ignore that.

She lays a hand over his forearm and strokes his fur. "When will we know?"

Just like so many other times, he'll understand.

 _"I'm not sure._ " Or basically that. It's getting more natural all the time, this automatic translation. The words are there, the strange grace of the language, but she doesn't have to wrestle for the meaning. " _I guess we'll just know._ "

"You're doin' alright. It's not hurtin' you. Or not a lot."

He nuzzles at her jaw, nose cool and wet, and as she breathes a laugh she feels him nod. " _It's easier._ "

"I want to so bad, though." Fingers combing through his fur, gliding over the back of his inhuman hand, and he shudders. It's not only the touch. "I was with Lori while you were with Rick and Shane, and the baby…" She trails off, and he sucks in a sharp breath.

But he has to have thought about this.

She shifts in his lap, pressing more firmly against him, and something that isn't quite a growl vibrates through his chest as he flexes against her lower back. It occurs to her that given their situation, in some ways this - a conversation about having babies - might be an equivalent of Hathsta dirty talk, and she wants to laugh again.

"It's nuts. I'm… Goddammit, I'm eighteen and you're a werewolf and the world's endin', I _know_ it's nuts. But I want to. I guess it's probably the _Heala_ talkin', like that's what I'm supposed to want, but I don't think it matters. I feel you, I feel _this,_ and I want…" She tips her head back against his impossibly broad chest and rolls her hips, clenches her thighs together, and if this is unfair for him, at least it's unfair for them both. "Fuck, I want _more._ "

He's wordless, tense, seeming almost to quiver beneath and behind her, and she can feel his fear like an echo of her own and her anger chases it. Not anger _at_ him, or at least not for the most part. Anger at his fucking _father,_ at his brother, at whoever or whatever else made him believe that he can't have this. That it can never be for him.

Because he's not the only one being denied.

"I told you," she says softly. "I wanna fight for somethin'."

She can feel him winding up to say something, scrambling the words together - even his own language failing him now - and she doesn't give him a chance. She reaches back and traces her fingertips down his rigid, burning shaft, and he whimpers her name, flexes again, and rocks forward, seeking more of her touch. And that's when she knows what she wants, and it's easy because she's already had it, both of them have, and his whimper is closer to a shaky whine as she levers herself out of his lap and starts to undress.

She's not looking at him as she shrugs off her jacket and tugs her shirt over her head, fumbles at her boots, her belt, her jeans. She's facing the light, heedless of the cold, letting it bathe her and knowing he's watching her and getting a view he hasn't had much of except when she's been on her hands and knees. She knows it's a good view, at least for someone who isn't looking for a porn star body: inward dip of her spine, slight flare of her hips and swell of her ass, nothing much in the way of curves but of course he won't give a shit about that. It's _her_ and that alone will drive him insane, and as she's wriggling off her panties - yes, as soaked as she thought, air cool on the wetness smeared over the insides of her thighs - she glances back and he's gazing at her with that now-familiar expression of combined adoration and animal hunger and needy despair, thick clawed fingers curled around his glistening cock and jerking himself in clumsy, eager strokes.

Less despair than there was. Considerably less.

She smiles at him as she scoots backward again and resettles herself, bats his hand away and takes him in both of hers and guides him between her legs.

She's done this before - sat in his lap and rubbed herself against his shaft until she came all over it. But then she was facing him and somehow this is even better, arching as she grips him and rolls, clamps her thighs tight around him, her pussy slicking him all the way to the head. Riding him like this, her head tilted back and her teeth bared as her moans force themselves out between her jaws, joining with his deep growls as he closes his hands over her waist and helps her. Lifts her, slides her up and down, and after a minute or two she doesn't have to do anything to make herself move. He's doing all the work, and if she's used him on herself before, now he's doing that to _her_ and it makes her wild, makes her dig her fingers into the fur of his thighs, reaching back and up to grope at his shoulders, his muzzle, her fingers trailing over the slippery smoothness of his teeth.

It's more than his teeth. It's more than his bestial strength and his power and the way he has her, the way she knows with a shiver that he won't let her go. It's more than his enormous cock and the thought of it pumping inside her, how fucking _good_ it feels as it works against her swollen clit, pressure and just enough friction, each slide of her body sending her higher. It's the light, the way it's surging up to meet her, her eyes wide as she watches it and clutches at him, because it's going to drag her away.

But it's not. It's not that at all. She's touching him, all of her, she's _inside him_ now _,_ there's nothing between her and him, everything intermingling. Together. She feels her heart pressing back against his as the light floods over them both, every harmonious beat, the incoming tide in their lungs, and she's sobbing incoherencies that might have begun as his name, tears of sheer arousal gathering at the corners of her eyes and trickling down her cheeks.

Not just arousal. Not just that.

 _I love you._ He's bucking up to meet her, thrusting just like she wants him to, so wet and _he's_ so wet and she doesn't know who's saying it anymore. _God, I love you, I love-_

An ocean of boundless red, trackless, and she sees unfurling petals, blooming in her head, in the core of her. Thorns catching her insides, pain bleeding into the pleasure, and isn't this how it's supposed to be? Isn't this so close?

Isn't this worth fighting for?

 _Onlucan._

 _Open._

His massive body slams itself against hers and his howl rings off the stone and echoes into the trees and plunges into the light as his climax pulses out of him, spurting so hot and sticky over her belly and thighs, everything she needs, convulsing against and into him, and when he bites down on the ridge of her shoulder she throws her head back and screams her ecstasy at the stars.

She wants more.

When it's time, that's exactly what he's going to give her.

* * *

She remembers him lapping at her, licking her clean, holding her loose and trembling in his big, strong hands. The dull ache of where he bit her - pleasurable in a way she still can't hope to define. His claws scratching delicately along her side and her spine as he tucked her into his arms. Dozing, she thinks later, and still half asleep as he helped her with her clothes. Aware that she was a fucking mess and enjoying it more than she would have dreamed possible, and then he was lifting her, not onto his back but against his chest, cradling her easily as he walked back in his smooth silence, a towering bipedal shadow moving against the backdrop of the end of the world.

She remembers smiling weakly against the base of his throat. Drowsing. Exhausted.

Satisfied.

Everything fades out, and the next time she's conscious of anything he's lowering her carefully to the ground and stepping away as she leans on the bike, the cracking of his transformation behind her and then his human hands on her shoulders and his low voice asking her if she can hold onto him. She nods. She can.

She does.

But the world is fading again, and somewhere in that sweet blur he takes her home.

* * *

One final brief period of lucidity before the dreams draw her back into themselves. Lying in her bed, naked, him at her back with an arm slung over her waist. By the depth and pace of his breathing, she knows he's asleep.

Home, such as it is. Barred, yellowish light cast across the floor. Window open a crack and the night sounds of the city drifting in - the hum of passing cars, distant sirens, barking dog, thudding bass, laughter. The yelling of arguing women, the coarse, playful shouts of happy men giving each other shit. Beneath it all, the steady whir of crickets singing in the wastelands.

This isn't such a bad world. This is a world she might fight for. This is a world that, for all its many darknesses, might be worth saving.

This is a world it might be worth bringing a child into.

She closes her eyes and snuggles back into the warm hollow of Daryl's body, and he tightens his arm around her and mutters something in his sleep. It doesn't take her very long to rejoin him.


	43. there are whispers in the stratosphere

**Note:** Yeah, sorry it's been so long. It's been for a good reason, at least: I finally finished Everything Where it Belongs (if you were holding off on it to see how terrible the ending would be, it's safe now) and I'm very pleased with it. This is now my only (active) multi-chapter thing, and at this point I plan to keep it that way for a while (I do have another one in the works, so watch for that). That doesn't mean I'll update super fast, but barring disaster, we're not talking a month between chapters.

Thank you for all your support and encouragement, guys. And I promise to not be annoying about it, but I'm modeling this somewhat on my favorite podcasts and I notice that they mention it all the time, so: Just as a reminder, I have (and this unbelievably horrible site actually doesn't allow me to use this name so I need to include a space) a P atreon (p atreon user?u=136106), and if you enjoy the work I'm doing and want to support it - and make it easier for me to justify the amount of time and effort I put into it - anything at all is appreciated. If you don't want to fuck with P atreon, there's also the tip jar (keepsingingpodcast . wordpress . com) on my podcast's website.

Thank you again. You make me happy. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 43: there are whispers in the stratosphere**

Beth stares down at the sigil scratched into the scuffed handle of the butter knife. For a few seconds she thinks it might actually work, and her diaphragm clenches around her breath, locking it into place.

Then there's a crackle, a tiny flash like an electrical wire sparking, and she rocks back on her knees as the breath puffs out of her in a sigh of frustration, the knife held loosely in her left hand. She scowls down at it, her other hand clenched tight against itself, and flicks a reluctant glance up at Shane's face where he's sitting across from her.

This is her fourth attempt and she keeps expecting him to get impatient. And he _is_ getting impatient. But to her mild astonishment, he's keeping his impatience under control.

Rick did say that he's the cyne's _teacher_. She supposes that implies that he wouldn't totally suck at it.

Shane is watching her with head slightly cocked, eyes narrowed. He sits back against the wall of the abandoned building, elbows resting on his bent knees and the medallion dangling against his chest flashing in the thin sun as he moves. His fingers tap each other in a twitchy little rhythm, one of the small things that betrays the impatience he is most definitely feeling.

She wonders glumly if he's restraining himself as a favor to her, or because Rick ordered him to _be nice to her,_ or some combination of the two.

Not like it really matters.

They're sitting on the pavement in the vast empty parking lot of what they call the _frithus_ and what she can't stop thinking of as Daryl's _den,_ even if he only technically occupies a tiny part of it. The first time she and Daryl met Shane out here, she hadn't been offered any kind of actual explanation for the selection of this place as a classroom, but she hadn't felt the need to ask for one. It made sense to her then, and it does now. The frithus is a place of safety and also of seclusion, the kind of place where someone who's still extremely bad at magic might be able to attempt to get less bad without being seen, bothered, or blowing everything to hell.

She's uncertain regarding how likely that last is, but given that she burned her entire house down mostly by accident, she's guessing she might be capable of a horrifying amount of destruction in the right circumstances.

She's still not sure how she feels about that. She feels a lot of things.

Shane nods down at the knife. "Try it again."

"What I'm doin' ain't workin'." She sounds petulant, like a cranky child, and she's instantly embarrassed. She has yet to see any evidence that Shane thinks especially well of her as a person, and she's not pleased about potentially handing him more reasons to keep feeling that way.

Well. Too late. Besides, she sucks at this, so he already has reasons in abundance.

"Ain't workin' _yet_. It's never gonna work at all if you quit." He holds out a big hand. "Give it here."

She gives him the butter knife and he lifts it to the light, turns it over and examines her latest effort. If she had done it right, it would allegedly have briefly glowed blue and then burned whoever she attacked with it, in addition to any damage it might do as a matter of course.

Instead it fizzled.

Three days with sigils. One day on wards and two days on enchanting, and she's barely been successful with anything she's attempted, and has thought with grim humor about a student at Hogwarts failing all their classes and getting expelled. A circle of protection about three feet in diameter that would shield her from everything up to a particularly vicious beagle puppy if put to the test, and - better - a glass that won't break no matter how many hard surfaces she throws it at. Which could be useful for her phone, anyway. Especially if there's also an enchantment that makes something waterproof.

Sigils are supposed to be _easy,_ or so she was told _._

 _Some goddamn witch_ you _are._

"Here. This is where you messed up." He holds the knife blade out for her to see, pointing to the outer curve at the bottom of the simple collection of swoops and slashes. "That curve's too sharp. Do it smoother, connect it to that bottom hook a little higher. C'mon, stop screwin' around." He prods the blade at her. "Do it again."

"Runnin' outta space on the thing," she mutters, taking it from him and picking up her own knife from where she set it down beside her.

"Yeah, so get it the fuck right this time."

She snaps her gaze up, stung, but what's playing around his mouth is faint amusement more than anything else. He nods at the butter knife again. "You're gettin' close."

Three days with him - with Daryl also, but hardly by herself at all, at least for _lessons_ \- and this is the first time he's given her something she would consider encouragement. But encouragement is unquestionably what it is.

She bites at her lip, knife in each hand. She doesn't like Shane. What she's doing right now, this is not for Shane. But she feels the pressure of his attention, imagines that she can feel a perverse desire on his part to see her fail-

And she's angry. Suddenly and powerfully, the anger rising in her like flame doused with alcohol. It's anger with no real object or focus, anger that simply _is,_ and she grits her teeth and glowers down at the handle of the knife as she grips it and, with her other, scratches the sigil into the metal below the failed one.

She moves quickly, almost carelessly. She isn't thinking about it. _Careless_ is right; she cares but she also doesn't, because _fuck_ him, because if he wants to see her fail she refuses to let the prospect bother her. Whatever. It matters that she learn this, it matters immensely, but right now she wants to shove it away from her and storm off into the industrial wastelands all around them, go ahead and embrace the petulant girl who's getting louder and louder in her head.

She scratches with all the rapid aggravation that she's feeling, and she almost doesn't notice the blue flash when it happens, and then the pulse of heat from her palm all the way up her arm, like a single strong heartbeat.

Her hands freeze and she blinks at what she's done.

The butter knife is just a butter knife again, not glowing at all and warm only from the heat of her own body. She's dangerously close to positive that she made it up. Wishful thinking made hallucinatory. She was fooling herself, and with good reason; she's wearily desperate to have something go right.

But she looks up and a hint of a smile is tugging at the corner of Shane's mouth.

Soft grunt to her left and she jerks her head around, startled - but not scared. She knew instantly who - _what_ \- it was, and now a large dark wolf is coming toward her at a steady pace, head low and thick tail swinging as he walks. Relief like she hadn't expected to feel floods through her, and she sets down the dagger and reaches for him when he gets to her, hooking an arm around his powerful neck and breathing a laugh as he butts his head against her jaw.

Daryl doesn't love leaving her alone with Shane. But he clearly also considers Shane trustworthy enough, part of the cyne regardless, and periodically he has to - or likes to - patrol the borders of this strange pocket world.

Now he's back, and the tension strung through her is loosening a bit.

"Just in time," Shane murmurs, and she can't discern any mockery in his tone. Daryl lifts his head with a soft _whuff_ and looks toward him, ears pricked. "Think she might've got it."

Daryl looks at him in silence for another few seconds, then turns his head back to Beth, lifts a paw and sets it gently on her thigh. When he's in this form it's almost impossible to think of him as human, though it's also difficult to think of him as completely an animal, and everything about his affect manages to be both alien and profoundly familiar. But now something has happened to him, to his eyes, and she perceives the man hiding inside the wolf, just as at other times she perceives the wolf waiting inside the man. He's practically speaking to her.

 _Show me._

She flicks her eyes up to Shane, who's watching them both with undisguised interest. Show him? There's really only one way to do that, now that the thing is enchanted, and she hesitates, considering - wondering how painful it'll be. Good way to know, though, and she's raising her forearm and preparing to show him - and herself - what she can do, when Daryl again butts his head into her shoulder, and this time it's insistent rather than affectionate. He pushes his paw more firmly against her thigh, and she understands.

Remembers what he did in the Library with Pythia, when she required blood.

 _Take it from me._

Not even that he was afraid for her. He must have known that Pythia didn't need enough to do any real damage. It was merely that this is what he _does_ now. He takes pain for her. Fear. Difficulty. When and where he can, he shoulders her burdens, or he wants to very badly.

It makes him happy to do it. Or at the very least it satisfies him.

She could refuse. Nearly does. Then she meets his sharp blue eyes, takes his foreleg in her hand, scratches the dully serrated edge of the blade across his furry skin.

Immediately he jerks - though he doesn't actually try to pull back and she can tell it's involuntary - and hisses, and the sound is once more so human that it jars her. It's clearly not as painful for him as silver would be, but the pain he _does_ feel is obvious enough that she's sure. It worked.

She got it right.

She releases his leg and he sets it down. He's favoring it, and she feels a stab of guilt in spite of what she knows, but he bends and nuzzles at her palm, letting out a soft whine. She drops the knife into her lap and strokes his neck and shoulders with both hands, leans in to kiss the top of his head as he sighs. A _thank you_ as clear to him as the words. It's the same as it always is when he's like this: he's her companion, her _friend,_ and all he needs is to be with her in silent and total contentment.

She suspects he sometimes assumes this form for the pleasure of that.

But after a few seconds he slips out of her arms and steps back, lifting his head and scenting the air, looking off toward the chainlink fence between them and the street. She understands: he's not done walking the boundaries, came over just to check on her, and he takes his work seriously enough that he won't quit until he's finished.

He returns his gaze to her, and she has no difficulty reading his lupine expression, the question he's asking with his eyes - which are much less human now. Does he have her permission to go?

She nods, smiles faintly and gives his head another stroke, and he turns and trots quickly away.

"Seems like you're gettin' comfier with it," Shane says, and she swings her head around to stare at him, surprised. It just doesn't seem like the kind of thing he would _say._ Not to her.

He keeps surprising her today.

She's wary. "Comfier with what?"

"The way he is with you, with Scyld. What it means." He pauses, leaning forward slightly, head cocked. Interested. "It was freakin' you out before. Was kinda obvious."

She snorts a laugh. But this isn't making her as uneasy as it might have before. It's been three days in fairly close proximity to him, interspersed with sleep - Daryl curled against or wrapped around her - and food and working her way back up through Candy Crush and a couple of refreshingly boring shifts at work. She sure as hell doesn't _like_ him, no, but maybe she's getting used to him. Could be he's feeling the same.

"Yeah?" She picks up her knife, runs a fingertip along the cool silver of the blade. " _You're_ sure as hell not comfy with it."

"Don't matter, 'cause it ain't like I can do shit about it," he says, tone flat. "Can't do shit about any of this."

"Why do you hate him?"

She doesn't mean to. It escapes her before she can stop it and then she's stuck, so she simply looks at him, his frame slightly hunched into a cool fall day and his eyes hooded, jaw set, face stony. And he can look as stony as he wants to; now that she's come out and asked him, she doesn't really give a fuck. Probably she should have asked it before this point, because this is ridiculous and she's sick of being around it. And there's what Rick told her about the hostility between the two of them, but that was early in hers and Rick's deeply weird acquaintanceship, and she's all but certain that he didn't tell her anything _like_ all there was to tell.

He's not answering. She presses the point of the blade into the pad of her finger and turns it, not breaking the skin but close, bright little spark that isn't pain at all. "Why do you hate _me?_ "

He _hmph_ s. "I don't."

"Bullshit. Since I got here, you've barely stopped bein' an asshole. Or… Okay." She points at him with the knife and returns to her finger. "You kinda stopped once we started lookin' into this whole mess. Maybe you don't hate me. But there ain't no way you _like_ me. And you hate him."

"I _don't,_ " he repeats, this time insistent above the level of a surly mutter - rising into exasperation. " _Look,_ girl, you can't just…" He sighs, rakes his fingers through his hair, glares at her with his features tight and frustrated. "You ain't dumb. Whatever else you got goin' on, you sure as shit ain't _dumb._ You've seen what we're dealin' with. You've seen it first-hand. The Ytend. We can't breed. We got no idea what happened to _any_ of the other cyne. Even if we did, pretty much everyone hates _us_. And now _he_ comes along with-"

"Wait." She raises the knife again, brow arched. This is new information - at least this degree of it. It doesn't actually surprise her, but still. "Why do they _hate_ you? Who's _they,_ anyway?"

"The other Alfan." Calmer. "I guess… I dunno what the fuck you'd call it. Us. Vampires. Gnomes, gods, the Fae, people like Cora. People who ain't human and ain't animals. All of us. Alfan."

"Drya?" Her voice is low, lower than she expected it would be, and his expression softens almost imperceptibly as he nods.

No. He doesn't hate her. It's more complicated than that.

"So why do they hate you?"

"They think we started this." He gestures around at the world in general. "Everything goin' to shit. 'cause of the war." He huffs, shrugs, looks away. She's suddenly positive that he's hiding from her, even if he doesn't know that he is - and she strongly suspects that he doesn't. He's hiding something, doesn't want her to see, but she hears it in his voice. Something like sadness. Something far too close to despair. "Hell, probably they're right. They ain't _wrong,_ anyway."

"Pythia said your cyne used to be better." She frowns as the memory rushes in. Rick's face, all anger and wounded pride. All of them. The word they keep using - _arweor._ Their honor, individual and collective. "Stronger."

She's half expecting him to exhibit that same angrily wounded pride, but he only turns his face back to her, and she sees precisely what she heard. "We all used to be stronger." He goes quiet for a couple of beats, then continues. "We were never the strongest of the Alfan. But we were damn strong, and for a long time we were one of the most respected. Other races, they dealt openly with us and they were almost all fair about it. Ain't like we were all _saints_ or whatever, we had our share of pricks runnin' around, but everyone held it that when you were dealin' with Hathsta, you could trust 'em. Our Eal kept their oaths, our Dema were just, our Uthwita were wise. Even our enemies respected us."

He flips a hand into the air, a gesture of profound disgust. "All fucked now."

She studies him, still toying with her knife, thinking of the times Daryl has had to play bodyguard. How relatively little he's had to do, in almost every case, to get whoever or whatever is presenting a threat to back off. "They ain't afraid of you?"

"Oh, they're afraid of us. But less. And before, fear wasn't the biggest part of it." He gives her a humorless smile. "It's a rule with us that if an Eal needs their people to fear 'em, they ain't fit to lead. The rest can force 'em to step down. You don't win battles on fear alone. Not any kinda real victory. Ain't gonna find anyone singin' no _Afen a Halig_ about that."

She's just opening her mouth to ask for a translation, but of course it's already there. _Sacred songs._ The meaning; as usual the Reord is far more graceful.

She looks down at her knife for a moment, then raises her eyes back to him. She detected sadness in him; it _is_ sad. It's not an unfamiliar story to her, not the basics, and a long time ago she picked up the important points. But there's how he's telling it now, and she feels it in her bones, the tragedy of it - tragedy in the purest sense. This ancient race, once-proud to the point of cliche, were their own undoing. They have to live with that, until the last one of their kind is gone.

It's horrible.

"I'm sorry."

Shane grunts, looks down too. Awkward. She guesses he wasn't expecting that from her either. "Yeah. Anyway." He scuffs a boot heel against the crumbling pavement. "It's _shit_ for us. You know that. We're a hair's breadth from goin' extinct. Every move we make could be our last one. _Everything_ matters." He jerks his chin at the fence, toward where Daryl went. She can't see him now, but he'll be close. "And him… Now, girl, I ain't sayin' he's a bad guy. Don't you misunderstand me. But you weren't there when we tripped over his sorry ass. He wasn't just runnin', wasn't just hurt. He was bein' _hunted_ , and they fucked him up _bad,_ and they weren't far behind. And he didn't have no cyne. Never came up with one. Feral, just about. So I said to Rick, okay, fine, patch the mutt up and send him on his way. But Carol got a soft spot for him. Rick too. Next thing I know, they're sayin' we're takin' him in. He's one of us now. Got a place and everything. _Spyre._ "

 _Tracker._

"He's a goddamn liability. Maybe Rick trusts him to keep his shit together, but I don't. Those assholes after him, his _brother_ was one of 'em. He's not a bad guy, like I said, and I _don't_ hate him, but alright. Here it is." He jabs a finger at her. "I just don't want him around."

He goes silent then, and she lets his final words lie where they've fallen, dissipating into the air like a bad smell. She should be mad at him. Shouldn't she? She's been mad at him for less, and it's not as if he just pulled a single punch. Though in fact, on second thought, it's possible that he did. It's possible that he could have been much nastier about it if he had cared to be.

It's also possible, she realizes - just a bit grudging - that she could be giving him a little more credit.

"Even if any of that shit was true, he's another fighter," she says quietly. "You'd be weaker without him."

Shane stares at her for a long time. Then he _hmph_ s again and rolls a shoulder, flicks his eyes off to a point somewhere over her head and to the side.

It's not completely a denial.

"What about me?"

He gives her a quizzical look. "Huh?"

"So you don't hate him. You said you don't hate me either. Do you not like me then, or what? What's your deal?"

Another long silence. He sits in the center of that silence and regards her with keen, narrowed eyes, and she regards him right back. It feels good, in a weary kind of way, to know that she's through being intimidated by him - to the extent that she ever truly was. Maybe she's struggling, maybe there's a whole world she still knows almost nothing about, and maybe she'll never deliver on whatever nebulous but considerable things are apparently expected of her. But today she tried something and she got it right, because she _can,_ and that's not nothing.

She can do more than she even knows.

"I'm not sure about you," Shane says at last. "Not yet."

She nods. That much is fair enough.

* * *

Her success is reproducible. She reproduces it. As she does, what becomes evident to her is that - as she should have predicted - overthinking is her enemy. Letting her focus drift _just_ enough appears to be the key. When she does, it feels as if she's merely recalling something she already knew - which makes sense, she supposes, if one lends any credence to the concept of _ancestral memory._ And at this point she's more than ready to do so.

She draws sigils. Reviews a few more and her first incantation, drawn from the _Fyr_ grimoire, which Shane - probably correctly - seems to have assumed she'll have the greatest natural affinity for. By the time they're done it's getting well on to dark and Shane is grumbling about food and being generally sick of the two of them. Daryl has returned - no longer limping - and settled down next to Beth with his chin on his paws, accepting the occasional petting with obvious pleasure. He barely glances up when Shane gets to his feet, and for a while after Shane is gone Beth sits with him under a rising half moon escorted by a few stars, absently stroking his solid flank and side.

She's thinking, and she's not entirely certain what about. Until she speaks.

"I dunno if I can learn fast enough," she murmurs. "If we don't have a lotta time…" She shakes her head, sighs, takes up her knife and slides it firmly into its sheath. "There's just so _much._ "

She's mildly surprised when he doesn't respond, a second later remembering with an internal forehead-smack that if he can talk like this, it's not in any language she can yet understand. But as she glances down at him he lifts his head and licks at the back of her hand.

And that's really the only response she needs.

* * *

They need food too, and things in cans heated over a camp stove is not especially appetizing. A few minutes and a wardrobe change later, he's pulling his bike out of the parking lot and onto the deserted road, and she's wrapping her arms around his waist, her head briefly finding its place between his shoulderblades. She does it now in significant part because she loves the sheer smell of him, that smell that caught her attention so strongly the first night he crashed on - and bled on - her couch. Leather, smoke - not even so much cigarette smoke as the smoke from a campfire - sweat, just that hint of blood, and wolf. The wolf most of all.

She presses her face against his back and inhales, and a sweet little shiver runs all through her as her pussy floods wet. It feels so terribly good to _want_ him this way, with less pain but no less intensity.

It'll happen soon. She knows.

It basically has to.

He doesn't ask her what she wants, and in truth she doesn't care. They've still done hardly anything that she could ever consider even vaguely in the realm of _Going Out_ , and it's hard to think of it that way now. She's happy to be with him, to not be running or fighting - and to have the later prospect of him _tongue-fucking_ her until she's literally too exhausted to stay awake.

Anything else is tertiary.

Once she would have felt intensely out of place in a bar. But that was once. Now is _now,_ and she's made use of her standard-issue fake ID more than a few times. So she doesn't bat an eye when he pulls them up in front of an invitingly questionable place standing on its own in the center of a tiny battered parking lot populated with pickup trucks, motorcycles, and one actual eighteen-wheeler packed awkwardly onto one side.

She doesn't _love_ these places. When she's gone into bars like this, it's been to forget that she's in a place in her life where she ever goes into bars like this. Get drunk on bad booze, dance to the jukebox, flash her knife and her scars if anyone decides to get too creepy. But tonight she's with _him,_ and she doesn't want to forget anything.

Getting at least sort of drunk and dancing still appeals. She wonders if he's ever danced in his life.

She's shouldering her way past the clot of thick-bodied bikers at the door, Motörhead pounding in her ears and Daryl's hand a comfortable weight against her back, and idly considering whether _ordering_ him to dance with her is the kind of thing she should genuinely feel bad about, even if it would in some capacity make him happy, when Daryl's hand disappears and then snaps closed on her upper arm, so tight it hurts her. He yanks her back against him, and she's trying to shake him loose and whirl and demand to know what the fuck he thinks he's _doing-_

And she sees his face.

Eyes wide and dark, jaw working, lip caught by his worrying teeth. He's frightened.

He's also enraged.

She's laying a hand on his chest and opening her mouth, not to ask him what the fuck he thinks he's doing but instead what's got him spooked so badly, but somehow she already knows, knows before he lifts his chin in the direction of the bar.

If she hadn't already known, she would have the second she saw them. Five men- No, six. No. Seven. Not that they're wearing team jerseys or anything, but they're blatantly and alarmingly linked by the _feel_ of them, a crude hard meanness hanging around them like a stench. They don't stand out from the rest of the crowd by virtue of appearance, but the few rough faces she can see all bear the look of people cheerfully in search of trouble and determined to make it if they can't find it in the wild.

One man in particular - powerful build, denim jacket, gray hair and beard. He's leaning backward on the bar and talking to a slightly smaller man with light, short-cropped hair, wiry strength, features chiseled by bad living. The bigger man says something that makes them both laugh raucously, and her skin crawls.

"It's them," Daryl breathes in her ear, and she thinks _of fucking course it is._ "It's him. It's Merle."


	44. the moon is the only light we'll see

**Chapter 44: the moon is the only light we'll see**

For a long moment she just stares.

Daryl stands behind her in frozen silence, still gripping her arm. It hurts, but she's only vaguely aware of it, not nearly enough to make him stop. But it's not as though she needs assistance in staying where she is. No way in hell is she getting close to those men. She hates to even look at them. They're just _wrong,_ and they're wrong in ways she can't define, which is part of what's shaking her. Not fear so much as bone-deep revulsion.

Not unlike what she feels looking at Ytend.

Daryl's brother. His _brother._ She grounds herself and studies him as best she can from this distance, his face and stance and the construction of his muscles, and yes: she sees it. The resemblance. Not strong, but she can tell that once it was much stronger. At some point the lives of these two men diverged so profoundly that they might as well be strangers. Possibly they are, from Merle's point of view.

But for Daryl it's been almost two decades of hoping, searching, belief that someday this last shred of family would be with him again. Part of him in a way a pack never could be.

Not holding a gun packed with silver to his head.

She presses back against him, tips her head up, and her whisper is bizarrely loud in her ears over the distorted growl of the music. "If they see you like this, will they know what you are?"

"Yeah." Grating. "They'd probably recognize me anyway. Saw me for long enough."

"What do we do?"

"We get the fuck outta here. Least for now."

She nods, and he releases her and maneuvers his way to the door. She follows, relief seeping through her veins with every step she takes from them, but just as she reaches the door, she glances back, and she's almost certain that one of them is looking at her. Not quickly, but eyes gliding over her and pausing for a fraction of a second.

Weasel of a man. Weasel face, a craftiness in it coupled with a fundamental lack of intelligence. She recognizes a crude species of danger, and she pushes on as soon as his gaze leaves her. He remains where he is, and for the final few seconds she has him in sight, she can see no indication that he's interested in her at all. But she wonders, as she steps back into the night, about how he would be able to tell that Daryl isn't human.

Wonders if he - if _they_ \- would know what she is too.

Then Daryl is taking her arm again - more gently - and tugging her away from the door and into the shadows beneath an overhang. Maybe she shouldn't, but she feels safer.

"Jesus," she whispers, and Shane's voice echoes faintly in her head.

 _He wasn't just runnin', wasn't just hurt. He was bein' hunted, and they fucked him up bad, and they weren't far behind._

Shane is irritating. He's frequently a jerk. That doesn't make him wrong, at least not about everything.

Daryl glances back toward the door. It's difficult to see him clearly in the shadows, and what light is falling over him is coming from an ancient Bud Light sign, but the shaking around his edges is not just the flicker of dying neon. He's actually shaking. Not much, but he is.

She's never seen him like this.

"Daryl…" She steps closer, lays her hands on his trembling upper arms and raises her head to catch his eyes with hers. _Are you all right_ is bullshit; he is very, very obviously not _all right._ But she has to say something. And it's not just her own unease now, nor is it what she can discern through her hands on him. She feels his disturbance in her gut, a thick churning beneath her diaphragm that threatens actual nausea.

She can feel his pleasure and his happiness, like he feels hers. But she thinks she remembers that he told her once, or someone did: what passes through this connection won't be confined to those things. Not when it truly strengthens.

He nods. Unclear what he's affirming, but it's something. He's upset but he's here with her, and he curls a hand against her waist. "I just-" He pulls abruptly away, turns and huffs out an exasperated breath. "Shit."

"We need to tell Rick. Right now." She pauses. This doesn't exactly feel _good,_ but information gives her the illusion of increased control over the situation, and maybe it'll do the same for him. Like they're actually doing something about this. Like at the moment they _can._ "Are they lookin' for everyone, or just you?"

"I dunno." He swipes a hand roughly down his face. "I dunno if they know about the others. I don't think they ever saw 'em. But that don't mean nothin'. They could've got it outta someone." Nothing for a brief moment, then he kicks the wall so hard she jumps and is amazed seconds later when he doesn't seem to have broken his toes. " _Shit._ "

"Daryl," she says softly - firmly - and touches his forearm. At once he stills, standing there and breathing hard, eyes half closed. Rick bites his throat; this is her version of that, and as she does it she feels his fresh calm flow into her - a feedback loop. Nothing that happens to one of them is isolated from the other.

Right now they're together. That's all that matters.

She gives his arm a squeeze. "We should go."

When he doesn't answer - and doesn't move - she knows they're in trouble. He's looking from her to the bar's door and back again, flickering green-gold reflections, and there's something in the set of his features that she doesn't at _all_ like. Something wildly determined, not entirely rational. His eyes seem to be at once narrower and wider than usual, sharp as bolts.

He doesn't have his bow this time. Careless, she thinks grimly. He was likely too focused on her. On being with her, being _happy,_ forgetting the rest of the bullshit all around them.

"You go. I'm gonna follow 'em."

She barks a hard laugh, doesn't sound much like herself. "Like hell you are."

"Someone's gotta," he persists, leaning closer. The mirrors in his eyes are brighter, and she doesn't miss the way his long incisors are even longer now. He's at the edge of letting go. "After the first time, I went lookin' for 'em and I didn't find nothin'. Now here they are. I might not get another chance."

"They almost _killed you,_ " she hisses, grabs the front of his shirt and clenches her hand into a fist. "You're gonna give 'em another shot at it? You are fuckin' _not._ I don't give a shit if he's your brother."

"Ain't about that."

"It _is._ " But she already perceives his logic, and it's solid, even if she hates it, even if it's still _stupid_ logic. It's not just that it's his brother. That's a lot of it, maybe most, but there's more here, and she can't ignore it.

"We leave now, we got nothin' on 'em. All we know is they're in Atlanta. We got no idea _where_. No idea what the hell they're fixin' to do. We don't know what they know. We don't know _nothin',_ and that's dangerous too. Maybe more, in the long run. Please." He lifts a hand and covers hers where she's still gripping his shirt, gentle. He's not telling her anymore. He never _was_ telling her.

He's asking.

She shakes her head, throat tight, everything tight. Even now she doesn't know exactly why she's so afraid, because it's not abstract, not drawn from what she knows. It's what she _saw,_ what lanced into her, their _wrongness_ , a threat for which she has no words. They're human, she's almost certain, but they're not _only_ human, and whatever that means…

"You go," he says, quiet and firm as she was. "We'll get you in a cab. Call Rick. Get to him, tell him what's up. Make sure they all know." Another pause, and now he's pleading, eyes and tone when he speaks again, in the language that still comes easiest to him. "Lufiend. _Please let me. I'm a tracker. I can do this, it's what I do. I swear… Sweet girl, I swear I'll come back to you._ "

In that moment she knows he won't go, if she tells him not to. If she commands him to get on his fucking bike and take her home, he will. He won't argue. He won't hesitate. He'll just do it. And it'll even give him some kind of satisfaction to have obeyed her, to have carried out her orders. Made himself useful to her. But in the end he won't feel good. Probably won't resent her, at least not exactly, but he _wants_ this, and she'll have denied him.

Part of her knew it would eventually come to this - a line this hard and this clear. A test, for both of them. What she's willing to do. What this bond has done to him. She allowed herself to forget what it truly is, wrap herself up in the gentle ways she's exercised her power over him before now - leading and not forcing, giving him permission to do what he wanted anyway but didn't know how to allow himself to have it.

Whatever the source of it, he _wants_ her to rule him like this, and he loves her more than she thinks she could ever understand. But there's a side to this that's cold. Pitiless. If she lets it be so.

Him standing in her apartment and not quite meeting her eyes, the air still tinged with the scent of sex, desperately wanting to not talk. Desperately wanting to go. Miserably unable to until she said he could. _Make me do it or fuckin' leave me alone._

It could be so ugly, this beautiful thing.

She sighs, and her hand loosens and drops away from his shirt, and she ducks her head and grits her teeth. There's really only one thing she can do now, and still be able to stand herself in the morning.

Assuming there is one.

"You can go. But I'm comin'."

"Beth-"

She crosses her arms. "That's it. I'm not debatin' this. You go, I go."

He looks at her for a long moment, eyes glowing in the buzzing neon, jaw tense. Everything tense. He's not happy with this. But he'd be even less happy with the other option.

And letting him go alone was never an option at all.

At last he nods, sighs, cups her elbow and starts herding her - in that entirely uncondescending way he has - toward the bike. She goes without protest. This is stupid and crazy and all manner of other unflattering things, but she's smart enough to recognize the lesser of a set of evils. Or she hopes she is. Because being wrong about this?

That would suck a lot.

* * *

She climbs on the bike behind him and he pulls around the side of the building into the shadows by the curb and a couple of dumpsters, where she guesses it's unlikely they'll be spotted unless someone is looking carefully. He cuts the engine and sits back, and she leans against him, peeking over his shoulder, one hand on the hilt of her knife.

And they wait. They wait for a long time.

She's never been hunting. Not _hunting_ hunting. But Otis - who lived on the farm for a while, hand and tenant both until he got married and bought his own place - took Shawn deer hunting once or twice, and while she hadn't been especially interested in doing it herself, she had been interested in what it was like. Asking Shawn about it later, he told her that for the most part, it actually wasn't that interesting at all. Sitting in a blind for an hour, two hours, waiting for a buck to come along. Once that happened, things did get interesting, but the whole thing was a lot more _stationary_ than he expected, and he wasn't all that keen on doing it again. Not that way, anyhow.

So this doesn't surprise her. Daryl is a tracker - _spyre._ A hunter as well. It was a dream, but it was still vivid, what Eostre showed her the night she found a way to ease the agony of his need for her. A dream that was also a memory: how she showed him his place in the world, his skill and his calling, his patience and his silence and his sharp attention as he moved like a shadow through the forest, the bow in his hands. Motion - but stillness also, and that's where the patience comes in. He'll wait hours for prey to show itself.

Not that she's comfortable thinking of those men as his _prey._ Because those men… Those men are hunters too. Dangerous ones. Very likely dangerous in ways neither of them know.

"They caught you," she whispers, her lips against his ear. She feels rather than hears the rumble of a growl in his chest, and when he answers her it's once more in the Reord, the words managing to be both smooth and clipped.

"Ic anfundan hie. _I found them. Tracked them. Chased them down. I was never after them, though. I only wanted to see him._ " He's quiet a moment, then: " _At first they just seemed like a gang. No trouble. Nothing I couldn't handle. I watched them until I was sure it was him, then I went to them._ "

He inclines his head toward the bar's door, eyes flashing when she catches a glimpse of them. He's still teetering on that edge between man and wolf: long teeth, bright eyes, darkness shifting beneath his skin, and bones that seem on the verge of breaking themselves apart. She wonders if he means to or if it's pure instinct. " _It was like this. But I wasn't careful. I walked right up to them._ " Abruptly he spits onto the pavement, scornful. "Fuckin' dysig. _Idiot. Might as well have laid myself down in front of them. Offered my throat. I didn't…_ "

He ducks his head, sighs as his hair falls around his face. His voice falls too, rough and nearly grating, and he doesn't sound scornful now so much as simply ashamed.

"I didn't know what they could do."

She holds onto him, her chin resting on his shoulder. She doesn't know how to ask - doesn't know what to say at all - but she's suddenly positive that he doesn't just mean being on his knees with guns pointed at his head. There's more behind that shame.

Something else happened that night. Something Eostre didn't reveal to her.

 _I'll show you. What he won't tell you. Some of it, anyway._

 _I don't think all of it should be mine to show._

She could ask him. She almost does, turning how she might do so over and over in her head, but just as she's opening her mouth to make the attempt, the door swings open and the men spill out onto the pavement. Three of them are staggering, two leaning on each other, all emitting more of that mean, raucous laughter. She doesn't imagine any of them have ever laughed at anything genuinely funny; these are the kind of men who laugh at misfortune, at pain, and walking at their front - leading them and not staggering at all - the man in the denim jacket smiles.

She feels Daryl tense against her. Merle is walking by the man's side, not staggering either, though he's weaving a bit. This is Daryl's family, she thinks, gazing at them and feeling faintly ill. His last living family, so far as she knows. His blood.

With these men. _One of_ these men.

The weasel-man who she thought might have noticed her turns and takes a couple of unsteady steps backward, shaking his lank dark hair out of his face. "Where to now, Joe?"

"Home." Joe's voice is low, resonant, as clear halfway across the parking lot as if he was standing next to them. "You all overdid it. Need to sleep it off before you're good for anything else."

"Was celebratin'," another man slurs, pulling off his bandanna and using it to wipe the sweat from his greasy face. "Ain't no point in doin' none of this 'less we get to _celebrate._ "

"Now, Tony, you know that there ain't correct." Joe shakes his head, all solemn reproach. "What we got us is a righteous cause. A mission for the betterment of the world. Ain't nothin' ever wrong with enjoying your work, but I wouldn't forget that if I was you." He turns, starts walking toward a line of motorcycles parked around a battered pickup, but pauses and glances back at them after a few seconds. "You know _he_ wouldn't be overly pleased if he got the sense you weren't takin' this seriously."

"Right, Joe." Tony nods vehemently, accompanied by a couple of the others. "Right. Sure."

"Well, alright, then." Joe nods as well - a satisfied gesture, as if he regards the matter settled, and so it appears to be. He makes his way toward one of the bikes without another word, swings a leg over, slides a key into the ignition and roars the engine to life. The others follow him, Tony and Weasel-Man taking the pickup, and as a ragged group they pull away from their spots and circle around toward the street, Joe still in the lead.

Daryl doesn't move. Beth catches a glimpse of his jaw set and working, another quick gleam of his teeth. His nostrils flare. She waits another few seconds, fighting back a shiver; the last of the bikes is almost out of view. She's about to ask Daryl what he's doing, why he's not following, when he rolls the bike out of the shadows and rumbles toward the street after them.

And it occurs to her then that he doesn't need to see them in order to track them. All he needs is a fresh trail.

He was right. This is what he does.

* * *

She's glad he apparently knows where he's going, because it doesn't take long for her to get completely lost. He takes turns suddenly and according to no logic she can follow, through run-down commercial areas and crumbling neighborhoods and shady avenues lined by better-kept houses. He weaves through traffic in the way she's gotten mostly comfortable with, but there's an urgency in his speed that wasn't there before. Once or twice she would swear he turns and doubles back, retraces his steps and takes a different route. But he never seems to truly second-guess himself. He's intent, single-minded. She can practically feel the vibration of his senses open for maximum input, the senses she knows and probably at least one or two she doesn't have any idea of.

He's going to find them. There isn't a doubt in her mind.

Her doubts concern what comes after.

From how he's talked about them, she's gathered that they probably don't live in Atlanta, so she's imagining transient lodging - shitty motel, shitty rented bungalow, or maybe shitty abandoned bungalow in which they're temporarily squatting. Yet she's not in the least surprised when Daryl turns them toward a collection of warehouses set in the midst of a series of wastelands, a lonely and disturbingly ruined place not at all unlike the frithus.

Except no. It's nothing like that.

There's no fence. Very faintly, she can see the sheen of what might be the metal of the bikes, the hulk of the truck half obscured by the shadow of the largest building. Daryl pulls to a stop by the crumbling curb, having placed them in a spot covered by the low spreading branches of a tree choked with a tangle of wild grape vines.

As in the parking lot, they should be hidden well enough. Unless someone is searching for them here.

She uncurls her arms from around his waist, lays her hands over his shoulders. He turns. "We go on foot from here."

A frown furrows her brow. She expected this, but she's not going to take it easily. "Hang on. You know where they are now. You got what you came for, right? Let's stop screwin' around and get _outta_ here."

"You know I can't do that." Quiet and rough. Not even really arguing with her. Just pointing something out. And she's still sure that if she orders him to take them away from this place, he'll comply. He _can_ do it, if she tells him to.

But she can't bear that now any more than she could bear it before.

She sighs, presses her fingertips against her closed eyes. "Daryl, please-"

"No, hear me out. We ain't just strollin' on in there with no protection." He climbs off the bike and turns to face her, unsheathing his knife, pushing up the leather sleeve of his jacket. "Look here."

She follows, looks. Her gut tightens, because she knows what this is, what it _will be_ ; she's seen enough to know the power blood has. They clearly don't use it for everything, but it's used, and now he sets the point of the blade against the skin on the inside of his forearm and slowly, deliberately, begins to carve.

 _Carve_ might be too strong a word. But _scratch_ doesn't do the job. He pierces the skin and blood wells, begins to trickle, and his mouth pulls into a pained line as he cuts a long swooping curve into his arm, crosses it with a straighter cut, crosses that one as well and finishes with a tiny curve in the center - nearly a circle. Part of her wants to grab him, tell him to _stop,_ but she's learned.

She's learned a lot of things.

Blood is running freely down his arm now, dripping onto the pavement. It'll clot very soon - he never bleeds for long unless he's been cut by silver - but for now it looks ugly, more blood than there actually is, dark in the distant glow of a streetlight.

She flicks her eyes up to his face, brow arched. _Explain._

"Stealth." He tips his chin down at it. "I'll move quieter. Blend in. If it's dim enough, they won't even see me unless they're lookin' right at me." He pauses, searching her face. "I know it ain't perfect, but it's somethin'."

Yes. It is. She swallows as she gets the implications. This is also what it comes to. No more lessons in the frithus, no more harmless little fuckups like she's in school. Or those lessons will continue, yes, but she can't afford to have the use of her power confined to them.

None of them can.

She drops her hand to her hip, unsheathes her knife. It flashes a pale gold. "Show me how."

He looks pained, and she can tell that it's not from his arm. He must have realized this would be necessary, should have made his peace with it, but perhaps he can't. Perhaps even something like this is difficult for him - seeing her physically damaged, for whatever reason.

Having a part in making it happen.

But also… It hits her, how her lessons have been going. She's never gotten it on the first try.

If she fucks this up, she'll have to start all over again.

She captures her lip between her teeth. She doesn't heal as fast as he does. Her blood doesn't clot as quickly. She's virtually certain that she feels pain more keenly than he does, or at least he's better able to ignore it. She's scared as she presses the point of her knife against her skin, and he'll know it.

He'll feel it.

But although she sees that fear reflected in his eyes, he's fixed with a strange calm as he extends his hand and lays it over hers. Familiar, and big and warm and rough, a paw of a hand, and the calm flows into her and her own hands don't shake quite so badly. They can give each other this. Pain and fear and anger, and pleasure, happiness, love… But also strength. Power. She felt his calm before, but only now does she understand the depth to which that's true. As long as he lives, she'll never be alone again, and the same is true of him.

Anyone who faces one of them is facing both.

She closes her eyes as he begins to guide her hand.

She winces softly; it hurts. But it doesn't hurt as much as she expected. The silver is both warm and cool as it slices into her, parts her skin, and it _tingles_ in the way an ordinary knife likely wouldn't. That warmth-coolness flows outward from the sigil as she forms it, spreads up her arm and all through her. She's being _changed,_ and changed in a way she's never been before. This spell might not be the biggest deal, as far as spells go, but she recognizes this for what it is.

A step. Another one.

His hand stills and she opens her eyes, looks down at what they made between them. And the first thing she thinks is that it's beautiful.

Hurts. Bleeding, a lot. But it's graceful, smooth, and as she stares at it, she realizes that it's just below the scar across her wrist.

She's not certain what that makes her feel. Only that it makes her feel something, deep.

He touches her face and leans close. Tips her head up with fingertips beneath her jaw. "Y'alright?"

She smiles at him, slides the knife back into its sheath as she presses into his hand. She's more than all right. It's not true, what her mind and heart are telling her now. But she'll believe it for a little while.

Together, they might be unstoppable.


	45. your grief and your sorrow

**Note:** Point of clarification, since it's hinted at earlier but I don't think it's clear enough (I'll be editing this for clarity when I do the Howl Volume One paperback): As far as Daryl was able to determine, Merle didn't recognize him. Daryl was basically still a kid when Merle left him, and they've both been through a lot of hard living since then, and you should assume that Daryl didn't get much of a chance to explain himself when they did meet again.

It's slightly handwavy, but it'll come into play again and will be clarified still more further down the line.

This is a pretty upsetting chapter, just to toss that out there. It upset me to write it, anyway.

❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 45: your grief and your sorrow, they trouble me so**

She doesn't need to see herself to know that the spell worked.

The noise is what she notices first. The noise - or rather the lack of it, as they make their way across the parking lot toward where the bikes are parked. Walking beside Daryl, she feels uncomfortably exposed; the lot isn't exactly well-lit, but there's enough skyglow that she suspects they would both normally be visible to anyone giving the lot more than a passing glance, and there's no cover. No piles of rubble, no smaller buildings or sheds anywhere close by, no abandoned vehicles. It's like they're crossing a stretch of desert under cover of very inadequate darkness.

But their passage is silent. She can't hear their footfalls at all. She's not making any real effort to walk softly, and she can feel the pavement under her boots just like normal, but there's no sound - no crunch or scuffle. Not even a whisper of clothing as they move.

As long as they keep talking to an absolute minimum and stay out of direct line-of-sight, as Daryl said, she imagines they'll be pretty much undetectable.

She's not at all happy about this. But she's less unhappy than she was, and while her arm still stings, it doesn't sting nearly as much as she might have thought. Maybe, when it comes to pain, she's more robust than she believed.

She's definitely felt enough of it to be used to it by now.

The building they've made their destination is longer than it is tall, larger length-wise than the Frithus or any of the other structures near it. Whereas the Frithus has the appearance of a place that was once used for manufacturing instead of storage, this looks as if it was a solely a warehouse - one that hasn't been used in years. Broken windows, crumbling concrete, and at first no evidence of any living presence beyond the bikes parked outside an ancient loading dock. But as they get closer she sees faint light flickering through the dirty glass that remains. A few windows only, but it's not as if they would likely need to spread out.

She's abruptly worried about navigation inside, until she remembers who she's with. Those mirrored retinas. He might not be able to see in absolute darkness, but probably close.

He touches her arm and she looks up at him, taking a breath. She's nervous, yes. No point in pretending she isn't. No _need._ Even if she could get away with it, she wouldn't have to play tough for him.

He knows she's tough already.

She gives him a tiny smile, nods. He doesn't smile back, but he returns the nod, hand lingering at her elbow, and again she feels that gentle flow of strength. And no, she didn't want to do this and she still doesn't, but as he leads them in a wider arc out and around to a more heavily shadowed side of the warehouse, the truth is that she's glad she came. Not just grudgingly satisfied. _Glad._

This feels like exactly where she needs to be.

The other side of the building from the loading dock proves to feature fewer windows and what look like a couple of large gas or propane tanks, as well as a dumpster surrounded by stuff that should probably have gone into it if it wasn't already overflowing. Someone tossed garbage bags here and they've been torn open, by animals or by the elements, spilling a chaotic array of old clothes and plastic containers, dully gleaming broken bottles, dangerously sharp-rimmed cans, other things she can't identify in the dimness. The ground is more uneven, more treacherous, but she feels considerably safer. However, that ends when she catches sight of a single small door fifteen or so yards away, and by one of the tanks Daryl catches her arm and halts her, tugs her close with his lips brushing her ear.

" _Follow my lead,_ " he whispers in the Reord - confirmation of how she had already guessed they would proceed, purely instinct and the knowledge of what makes the most strategic sense. She nods, and he continues. " _I'm not interested in getting into a thing with them._ " She hears rather than sees his grim smile. " _Kind of learned my lesson the first time._ _I just want to get a peek at how they're set up. All right?_ "

She nods once more, and he steps back and jerks his chin in the direction of the door. "Alright. C'mon."

It occurs to her as he lays his hand on the knob that it might be locked - and immediately after occurs to her that this probably presents no difficulty for him. But it turns easily and silently and when he inches the door open it gives him no resistance. She catches the flare of his nostrils and the slight lift of his head as he scents the air, glances back at her, and slips soundlessly into the darkness beyond.

It's darker than outside, but still not so much that her eyes don't begin to adjust, and he stands beside her just inside the door and allows them the chance to do so - considerate of him, given that he almost certainly doesn't need to take the time for his own. Gradually she makes out a large storeroom mostly empty of anything except a set of metal shelves, a few scattered cardboard boxes warped with damp, some more broken bottles, and an old mattress stuffed into a corner, which she can't see clearly but which she's sure must be covered in suspicious stains. The walls are dotted with clumsy and artless graffiti, tags and obscenities that no thought appears to have gone into. It smells like mold, and faintly like rotting flesh.

It's not so different from any other abandoned space she's been in - not that she's been in a ton of them, at least not before this new phase of her life began. But it's not like those others at all. If the Frithus is a place of safety, this sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. The men had felt _wrong_ ; this place does too, and more so. Looking around, seeing it fairly well now, she's fixed with a skin-crawling conviction that she's merely seeing the surface of it, that beneath this relatively mundane facade is something far more singularly awful.

It's a bad place, and they should not be here.

She looks at Daryl - sharply, not out of anger but because she's yanking herself out of half a trance, understanding that she was in one only as she does. He looks back at her, eyes deep and glowing.

Before she can say anything: " _I know. I feel it too._ " He lifts his head again and inhales deeply, features twisting into something like revulsion. "Let's do what we gotta do and get outta here _._ "

A door on the far side of the room is open and hanging most of the way off its hinges. It looks frankly precarious, and she keeps as much distance as she can between herself and it as they pass through and into a narrow hallway beyond.

Narrow the hallway may be, but its ceiling is high, and everything is the tiniest bit brighter, though she can't pinpoint the source of the illumination. Pipes run along over their heads, crusted with rust, actual stalactites of it hanging from their joints. They pass one door and then another, but both are closed and Daryl doesn't pause. She doesn't question it; something about them feels _unnecessary_ , and she's positive that whatever they're here for, it's not waiting on the other sides.

It's ahead.

They continue silently, not even their breathing audible, and she has to take a couple of deep breaths at one point to remind herself that she's breathing at all. But as they walk, she's filled with the intensifying feeling that the walls themselves are respirating, almost imperceptibly pulling in and releasing, as if soft, wet flesh lies behind the cinderblock.

And it comes to her, with a ripple of horrified loathing, that it's entirely possible that it does.

But he doesn't stop, and neither does she, and it's probably that persistent silence that allows the voices to reach her ears.

Daryl slows a full ten seconds before she hears them, and she finally does too just as she's about to touch his arm and ask him what's going on. He heard them before she did, she doesn't doubt it, and she still can't make out what they're saying - only that they're _there,_ that rough, mean amiability, rising into laughter and falling again.

She's not disappointed that she can't pick out any words.

The sources are still a good way ahead; she's also sure of that, and the sound has a distorted, echoing quality that suggests that it's not reaching them via a direct route. It's not a totally straight shot from her and Daryl to them. Fine by her; easier to keep themselves hidden, and while this time she follows more reluctantly when Daryl resumes, she does follow.

Glenn would be good to have right about now, she thinks. A pathfinder. A tracker and a pathfinder; a strong combination.

But they're stuck with only each other.

They come to an intersection and make a left, then an immediate right. Daryl pauses at the second turn, scenting again, but only for a few seconds. The hallway broadens, brightens - though it remains extremely dim - and she spots a light flickering in the distance.

Not through a hallway.

And Daryl stops dead, so suddenly she almost collides with his back. She breathes a curse, steadies herself against his shoulder, and moves to his side to peer ahead.

They're standing at the entrance to a much larger room - one of the warehouse's actual main rooms for its original function, she guesses. The ceiling is lost in shadow, but light penetrates on either side through sets of grimy windows yards away. It's difficult to judge the distance, only that there's a considerable amount of it in all directions. And it's largely unobstructed; as far as she can tell, the room is empty.

Except something is in its center. Hanging, she realizes after a few seconds. Hanging from a metal beam above them, that might have served as a rail for transportation. Now something that looks like a long, thin sack is dangling from a chain hooked to it - dangling and swaying ever so slightly, soft clinks drifting from the chain to them.

The smell of decay is abruptly much stronger. And it's not _old_ decay, not like she thought initially. This is decay at the start of its process. She's been around enough dead things in her life to know the difference.

It's not a sack.

Daryl takes a step forward. He's shaking. He's shaking worse than when he saw Merle. She can't see his eyes, but she knows they're locked ahead on the thing hanging from the beam.

" _Eostre,_ " he breathes, in a voice she's never heard before and never wants to hear again. " _Eostre, ahredde thin wermagth._ "

 _Eostre, save your people._

When he moves again, she follows, wordless. It's all she can do.

Despite the thin light coming in through the windows, darkness seems to gather around it. It remains a featureless shape until she's only a few feet away, and then it's as though she's passed through a membrane - a _veil_ \- and the light penetrates it, and she can see. And she halts.

She can't stop looking.

She only becomes aware of Daryl standing next to her when he releases a hard, thick breath, almost a moan. She had forgotten him, her attention devoured by what's in front of her. Which is the naked body of a young man - really a boy, surely no more than a year or so older than she is and possibly younger - dangling about a foot above the floor by the chain wrapped around his ankles.

He hangs there, his eyes open and staring. Bulging, centerpiece of a bloody face contorted into a final mask of horror and pain. Slowly - numbly - her gaze travels upward, and she's unable to stop it. Some part of her is forcing herself to see. To witness. The boy's pale skin is a mass of more blood, the source of it many thin slashes that look as if they might have been made with a razor blade. Something incredibly sharp. They're everywhere: his chest and stomach, his thighs, his arms where they hang below his head, bound at the wrists. Patches of his skin are completely gone. His throat has been cut. The floor beneath him is dark. A dry pool, black in the dimness.

And his…

She's seen things more horrible than anyone should ever see. She's lived with them, ghosts haunting her mind. Through all of it, she somehow retained the better part of her sanity. And this is not as horrible as cradling her father's severed head in her lap, but in this moment it's more than she can bear, the sheer _cruelty_ of it, and she looks away.

"They fuckin' castrated him," Daryl whispers, bloodless and dry as leaves in the dead of winter.

" _Why?_ " No louder than him, but her throat hurts like she's been screaming. It's all she can think to say, and she has no idea what answer could possibly make sense to her. This isn't the Ytend. This isn't killing to feed, or killing through sheer bestial murderousness. This is something else. This is-

Daryl reaches out and touches the boy's chest, terribly reverent, and she can look at that, if she can't look at anything else, though it makes her want to drop to her knees and cry. "He was one of us." He swallows. "He was Hathsta."

 _How do you know?_ But that would be a stupid question. Of _course_ he knows. Of course he would know his own kind, in a world where hardly any of them are left.

" _Gyden,_ they're huntin' us. _Aglacan._ " _Monsters. Wretches. Filth._ His hand falls to his side and he merely stands there, helpless. Trembling. "They're huntin' us for _sport._ "

Voices. All at once she hears them again, and oh God, oh _God…_ She steps back, groping for his arm.

They're louder. Getting louder every second.

They're coming.

"Daryl, we have to go." She knew it was bad, what they did. What they were threatening to do. Him on his knees and them all around him, guns loaded with silver pointed at him, but she knows what he's thinking and he has to know that she's thinking the same: they wouldn't have shot him in the head. Not if they could have helped it. Not unless he forced them to. They wouldn't have made it that quick.

This is what was waiting for him.

This is what his own brother might have done to him.

He doesn't move. Gives no indication that he's even heard her. His lips are moving slightly. She seizes his wrist, yanks. _"Daryl,_ let's _go._ "

He looks at her then, his eyes as wide as she's ever seen them, and she has no idea how to define what she sees on his face, and they have no time for her to try. She tightens her grip, digging her nails into his flesh, grits her teeth - because she has to do it, and if there was ever a time she was justified, she thinks this might be it.

"Daryl." Low. Hard. She flings out his name and the command that follows like a slap across the face. "Take me out of here. Right fuckin' _now_."

Something behind his eyes seems to _snap,_ to break open, and while he still looks dazed, there's a steel band running through him that hadn't been there before. At the other end of the room, through a set of wide double doors she's seeing only now - mostly closed, but she could swear there are shadows moving in the space beyond it. Words she can't make out in a complaining tone, and then Joe, Joe talking, that same calm reasonableness she heard in the parking lot - the calm reasonableness of a man who has no trouble chopping a boy's dick off in the midst of torturing him to death.

"Merle, you know it's your turn to get the head for him. He's expectin' that from you, he made it clear last time. He _wants_ to trust you, but if you can't-"

Daryl is already changing. No slow sensuality, no care for the fact that she's watching. It happens faster than she's ever seen before except in the Library, in the fire, and she barely remembers that in the chaos of those moments. Now she sees it clearly: he takes a few steps, drops forward with a series of awful wrenching cracks, and when his hands hit the ground they aren't human hands anymore. She's reaching for him at the same instant he reaches for her, catching his fur as he drags her up onto his huge back. He's running almost before she manages to solidify her hold, sprinting on all fours toward the doorway they came through and the dark hallways beyond.

Behind them, she hears the grind of battered hinges as the doors at the far end of the room open. She doesn't know whether they were seen. Doesn't know whether they're being pursued. She doesn't know anything, clinging to him, eyes squeezed shut and shivering with terror - for him so much more than herself - and praying to whoever or whatever is listening that when she opens her eyes, they'll be miles away.

The thunder of his heart and the air in his lungs like a stormy ocean, the pounding of his legs and the wind pulling at her hair - he's running that fast, tearing through the door and across the pavement. When she opens her eyes, they're not miles away, but he's standing in the shadow of the tree, the bike in front of them. He's still on all fours, and somehow she manages to locate her feet as she slides off him to the ground.

She turns, stares at him. He stares back, tongue lolling as he pants, his shoulders heaving. That same undefinable look in his eyes.

It's possible that she hears shouts a long way away, back across the parking lot. She might be imagining it.

It doesn't matter.

She reaches up and lays her hands against the sides of his muzzle, feeling the damp heat of his breath. The wetness of flecks of foam at his lips. The gleam of his enormous teeth. He's wild, and though the creature crouching before her is just as much man as he is animal, a perfect combination made something far greater, she sees nothing human in him now.

She's not afraid of him.

"We have to go," she says softly.

He hauls in a breath and releases a single word like a curse, all cold rage. " _Flasctawere._ "

 _Butchers._

"I know. You can't help him." She strokes a hand down the top of his muzzle, all smooth fur in spite of everything, and he closes his eyes. "You can't do anythin'. He was already dead when we got there. Daryl, we have to go now. Please," she adds, pushes his snout gently downward and leans in to press her forehead against the bony ridge of his brow. "Please."

A pause. Long. Almost too long. But then he nods and seconds later he's changing back, shrinking, falling into himself, practically on his knees in front of her. Then up, pushing past her without a word or a glance, swinging a leg over the bike's seat and snarling the engine to life.

She climbs on behind him, slides her arms around his waist, and they go.

* * *

He stops in a park. Not the Botanical Garden; she doesn't know where they are. A drive circling a small lake, a gentle grassy slope lined with trees on their right, streetlights but nothing close. The place is deserted. She glances up; there's no moon visible, and she can barely see any stars.

He gets off the bike, still without a word, and stumbles forward. She knows he's going to collapse a few seconds before he does - not anywhere near enough time to get to him. But she's trying, as he hits his knees she's trying, as he slumps forward and lets out something trapped between a whimper and a sob.

She drops down beside and behind him and curls her arms around him, her head pressed between his shoulderblades - like the bike, but not. There's no joy of speed, or even the relief of it. They're locked into place, motionless, and neither of them can escape what they left back there.

What it means.

She realizes she's weeping as he starts to change again beneath her, and she understands that it's simply because he can no longer maintain a form that ultimately isn't his. She doesn't let him go even as he swells beyond her ability to hold fully onto him. She remains where she is, her face buried in his fur, hiding against him like she has before even if any shelter she finds like this is ultimately illusory.

 _Butchers._ Yes, they were. They are. That's exactly what they're doing right now, or what they've already done. It doesn't matter that neither of them knew him; that boy deserved a funeral, deserved to have some kind of honor even if it couldn't make his death any less hideous, instead of the abomination he's going to get. The abomination in which Daryl's brother will play the central role.

There is no part of this that isn't obscene.

It's sudden, but she finds that it's not a surprise to her when he lifts himself and tosses his head back and howls. She's heard him howl before, all pleasure and release, and this is nothing like that. It's long and low and it begins almost softly, rises into the night. It continues until he runs out of breath, and then he fills his lungs and begins again. It's tuneful, sweet in the most strange and terrible way, and she knows that she's hearing something that wasn't meant to be done solo. Other voices are supposed to join his now. A chorus of them. This is a song, a song for the dead, and he's not supposed to be singing alone.

There used to be so many of them, these people. Now they're almost gone.

And they've lost another.

He won't get a funeral, this nameless boy. But at least someone is mourning him, honoring him as best they can, and she leans against Daryl's side as he howls and listens to him as hot tears stream down her cheeks.

She used to sing. She used to sing all the time. She doesn't sing anymore, not really, and she feels it now - what she lost when she stopped. When she stopped even feeling like she _could._ She wishes she knew this song. It wasn't made for her throat, but she could still try, and the trying might be all that would matter.

But she doesn't know it. So she simply listens until he falls silent, until he pulls that ill-fitting cloak of humanity back over himself, until they climb together onto the bike, and he takes them back into the night.


	46. we live and throw our shadows down

**Chapter 46: we live and throw our shadows down**

Rick is quiet for a long time after Daryl stops talking.

No one else takes up the silence. Beth looks at him, at Daryl, down at her hands where they rest on the plain, polished wood of the dining room table. The way they're all arranged around it, she thinks of a conference - which this basically is - or a council meeting to discuss the strategy for fighting a war - which she strongly suspects it will become. There's no other way for this to go. She can already feel it, something like the smell of ozone hanging in the air, the harbinger of lightning.

Everyone is looking at Rick. Rick isn't looking at anyone. For some reason, what she can't get past is that it's the longest single stretch she's ever heard Daryl fill with talking. It was clearly difficult, halting, him wrestling with the lingering horror and rage, but after a few minutes of struggle he returned to the Reord, and after that it was easier. Not much, but even so.

Not any easier to listen to, though. Even if there are still occasional words that don't translate themselves perfectly for her. Full understanding or not, it wasn't something she could get away from. She has a feeling it'll fuel her nightmares for a while.

Great, because she really needed a refill there.

"Guess none of us should be all that surprised," Rick says finally, and leans over his hands, raking his hooked fingers over his scalp. Beside him, Lori doesn't try to hide the concerned once-over she gives him. It's well past two, and Beth's phone call had woken him. She doesn't know about the rest of the cyne, but she guesses at least a couple of them were roused in much the same fashion, either by phone or magic. No hunting tonight, apparently.

"Exactly like Pythia said." Michonne taps her slender fingers against the tabletop, mouth tight. "We knew it was coming. Was just a matter of time."

"No two ways about it. We have to deal with 'em." Rick looks up and to his right, straight at Shane, who hasn't said a word since they all sat down. After a couple of seconds, Beth gleans a little of what might lie behind his impassive expression, and she knows why: Rick is expecting anger, and is expecting it to be directed at a specific person.

But Shane remains silent. A beat, and he lowers his eyes.

"Well, we do know something else." Glenn's tone is grim. "We're not the only ones left."

Carol shakes her head, once. "Or we weren't. We know about him. As far as the rest of it goes, he might have been it."

"God, can we hope for the best?" From grim to exasperated, and there's a desperation beneath it that's painful to listen to. "Just for once? Isn't this bad enough already?"

"We can hope, sure." Carol sighs. "Hoping isn't the same as expecting."

Soft growl from Rick - clearly to bring to order rather than to intimidate, and Carol and Glenn cease the debate, to the extent that it had even been one. Beth presses her fingertips briefly to the bridge of her nose; abruptly she's feeling just how tired she actually is, the adrenaline that kept her going until now seeping out of her bloodstream quick enough to jar her. She doesn't want to think about this. She's been thinking about it for what feels like hours. She won't be able to escape that boy's awful face in her dreams, but just now she feels like it's worth suffering through.

Let Daryl curl his huge, soft body around her and sleep.

"It's possible," Michonne says slowly. "Possible there are still others. I never really believed they were gone anyway. But there's nothing we can do about that now. There's no way to be sure without a fresh hunt, when we're stretched thin anyway, and when it comes to _hunting,_ we have bigger problems."

Rick turns toward them, leans a little further. "Daryl. Were you spotted? Followed?"

It's not an answer he wants to give. She feels it before he speaks, the tension in him as if it's her own, tightness in her shoulders and gut. "I dunno. We got outta there quick as we could." He pauses, and it's an uncomfortable pause. "They coulda seen us. Maybe."

Again, Beth catches Rick shooting a glance in Shane's direction. And again, nothing from him but that unreadable gaze. "Alright. Regardless, I think we should assume we're on a clock, and there's not a lot of time on it. Whatever we're gonna do, we do it just as soon as we can."

"Tonight," Shane murmurs, and Rick shakes his head.

" _Too_ soon. We charge in there half-cocked, we're liable to lose people. These aren't a bunch of dumbasses packing silver and thinking they're superheroes. They're dangerous. Yeah, maybe even to a cyne. If this goes to hell, it ain't gonna be because we underestimated 'em."

" _Charge in,_ " Beth says, and looks around at all of them, brow furrowed. Those are two words she doesn't like in close conjunction. Not after having been inside the place she's almost positive Rick is suggesting they _charge into_. "You mean where they're hidin' out?"

Michonne rolls a shoulder. "It's an option. It's..." She smiles thinly. "It's on the table."

"Might be the best one," Rick says, rubbing his jaw. "It's enclosed. Limited number of entry and exit points. Could trap 'em in there, pick 'em off."

"We see better in the dark than they do. Plus, y'know. Magic." But Glenn doesn't sound altogether convinced.

"Yeah, and it's _their territory_." The words come out more exasperated than Beth intends, but the truth is that she _is_ exasperated. Or… Not exasperated. Exhausted. And the truth is that yes: the Hunters - they've become a proper noun in her mind - have to be dealt with. The sooner, the better. "They know it. We saw part of it, but just a tiny part. They'd have the advantage in there."

"Not strength," Carol says, though she doesn't seem to be arguing. Merely pointing out the accurate and the obvious. "Size. The things Glenn mentioned. Daryl, how many did you say you counted?

"Eight." Daryl's voice is low, flat, his gaze still fixed on his hands. Not shame. Not fear. He would merely give anything to not be here, to not be saying what he's saying. "Eight, countin' Merle."

"So there's more of 'em than us. But it evens out, given everything else." Shane halts for a second or two, frowning thoughtfully. Then, somewhat to Beth's surprise: "Thing is, Beth's right, Rick. They know the territory. Might make the difference, tip the scales just enough for them to fight us off. Maybe worse."

"So what's the alternative? Draw them out?" Michonne: not argumentative either. Asking. "Lure them somewhere? That has a lot of question marks too. It'd have to be all of them, all at once, and the right place at the right time. Lot could go wrong, and it's the kind of thing they might be expecting."

Rick sighs wearily, swipes a hand down his face. "I don't think there are any _good_ choices here. We're already in a shitty place just sitting here having this conversation." He's silent for a long moment, the table once again silent with him. Waiting.

Beth thinks she can feel Shane's eyes on her. But when she looks at him, his attention appears to be locked solely on Rick.

"Daryl," Rick says finally. "You sure you saw only the two doors? Main one and the back?"

Daryl nods. "Don't mean there weren't more, though."

"That's true. But it's something to go on." He looks around at all of them, gnawing at his lower lip, then seems to decide something. Beth's stomach drops. "Alright. I don't like the idea of going in after 'em, no. It's a bad option. But I think it's still our best one. Glenn, you and Daryl head over there before dawn, stake it out for a bit, cloak yourselves best as you can and scout around. Make sure it's just the two ways in and out. Don't do anything stupid, but see what you can see. Then report back."

Glenn nods, though he's clearly uneasy. It is, Beth thinks, basically the only reasonable way to feel. Her hands have tightened into fists, gut clenched to match, but no other argument is coming to her, and her place in this still feels so shaky. Lori says she has a family now, but that doesn't mean all of them have welcomed her with open arms, or will.

The fact is that even now, she barely knows them.

Daryl's face, when she looks at him, is set and closed. Even to her. And he doesn't meet her gaze.

"The rest of you, get some sleep. Bed down here, I think. Best if we're all in one place. When we hear from Daryl and Glenn, we'll figure out our next move."

Another silence, and of a completely different quality. No one argues. No one asks questions. There's a kind of _internalization_ about it, something deeper than resignation - not emotional. Five people taking Rick's instructions as a judgment and accepting the reality it presents.

Even Daryl.

Until Lori speaks up, soft but not at all timid. Confident of her ground.

"Sweetheart. Are you sure?"

With someone else, in some other circumstances, she might have expected Rick to brush her off. Mate or not, she's not Hathsta. _This isn't any concern of yours,_ he might say. Dismissive, even if he's kind about it in a vaguely condescending way. But he doesn't do that. He isn't _like_ that. He doesn't consider her question for long, but he does consider it, and he does so with all of himself, his eyes flicking down and growing distant as he pulls inward. And in that seemingly mundane moment, in a fragment of it, Beth senses it. What joining with someone like that does to you.

It's not a vow. No one has told her as much, but she doubts there ever would be - _will_ be - a vow. A verbal promise would be crude. Rick and Lori are bound together by the mind, by the heart, by the _bone._ Like Scyld, but not the same. Fully equal in nature, not just intensity. Communion. Obligation. Neither of them is ever alone - she thought she already understood that part. Neither of them is one person anymore. Neither ever will be again.

That's not an easy thing. When she first met Lori, she saw pain in her eyes.

Lori could tell him she wouldn't allow this, and while he might do it anyway, the consequences would be far more severe than an argument. She can call him back, ask him to reconsider, and he will. He couldn't have said no to her. And he can't lie.

If he tells Lori he's sure, he's sure.

So he raises his head and looks at her, nods, and that's the end of it.

* * *

Things break up slowly as people drift away. It feels like things are breaking up _around_ her, like she's in the midst of it but not _of_ it. The exhaustion that's been dragging itself over and into her has nearly reached a saturation point, and she thinks that if she laid her head down on the table, she might pass out right there. But no: she wants to go home. Or back to Daryl's den. Either place - go there and sleep for a million years.

And have him go with her. Which she knows she won't get.

Idly - and with distant horror - she wonders what would happen if she countermanded Rick's command. Placed Daryl between herself and Rick, rope attached to either arm. Whether he would eventually be pulled to one side or the other, or…

Hand on her shoulder and she gasps, jerks her head up. She almost _had_ been sleeping. Such a familiar hand, and she sighs and raises her own, covers Daryl's.

"Y'alright?"

She levers herself out of her chair and turns to him, arms folded across her chest. "I don't want you goin' back out there."

Not a command. Merely a statement of fact. He ducks his head. "Yeah, me neither." He pauses, lifts his gaze to hers through the fall of his hair. "Glenn'll be there. He's good. He'll have my back."

"Maybe I'm worried about him too." And maybe she is.

He shakes his head slowly, frames her shoulders with his hands. The strength in those hands. She instantly feels safe, even though she knows there are things he'll never be able to protect her from. Never be able to protect himself. "You knew the Library wasn't the end of it, magden," he murmurs. "You told me yourself. You knew shit was gonna get bad again."

She releases a huge breath. She knows. She knows so much more than she ever wanted to. At the beginning of this, she said she wanted to understand why it happened. She doesn't think she would take it back now, knowing what she does.

But she's not completely certain she wouldn't.

She steps forward into the circle of his arms, and presses against him, cheek firm against his chest and the thud of his heart in her ear, and he holds her tight, resting his chin on the top of her head. Around them and out in the hall, in the kitchen, she can hear voices, but they're indistinct and she doesn't care about them. Later, maybe, she will. For now this is her entire world and this is all she wants it to be.

"You swore you'd come back to me," she whispers, leans back and up and catches his gaze. "You do that."

 _I'm telling you._

"Gea, agendfra," he breathes, cups her cheek and tilts her face up and kisses her, slow and very deep, and she moans and sinks into it.

 _Yes, mistress._

* * *

It feels like he leaves her seconds after that, though she knows it's minutes. He stayed with her as long as he could, and he left her with instructions to find Lori, who will locate a place for her to sleep. No, she's not going home. If the cyne is making this their base for now, that includes her. It's safest.

She doesn't push back enough to make him beg. She doesn't push at all. He's right.

She passes by the living room, where Carol and Michonne have already changed fully into wolf form - more comfortable sleeping that way in this situation, she supposes - and are curling up together on the carpet. Glenn lingers by the front door, still looking uneasy, but he gives her a nod and a little smile as she passes him. She returns the smile, and it feels good.

Yes, she barely knows Glenn. But she knows that she likes him.

Lori is nowhere to be seen, but a baby's soft, chuckling cry comes from the floor above, and she heads for the stairs, taking it as an indicator.

But she stops, hand on the polished wood of the banister, when she hears Rick's voice. In the kitchen, just loud enough for her to make out the words, and the words themselves are what arrested and held her.

"You didn't have anything to say?"

"You already know what I think." Shane, voice tight and emotionless in the way someone's voice is when they're trying to fight back intense emotion. "Don't matter now anyway. It happened. You're right, we have to deal with 'em. That's the end of it."

"You're telling me this isn't gonna be a problem?" Pause. " _You're_ not gonna be a problem?"

"Why the fuck would I be a problem?" Irritation seeping through, jagged-edged.

This time she can practically hear that Rick's teeth are bared. "You _know_ why. You've been looking for an excuse to go at his throat from the beginning. Now he's given you one. I don't totally understand why you have such a problem with him, but I need to be sure you're not gonna take advantage."

"You don't understand why I have a problem with him," Shane repeats. Cold.

"Not completely, I don't." Another pause, and when Rick speaks again it's in a hiss so quiet she nearly doesn't hear it at all. "Or do you have some kinda problem with me?"

"No."

"You sure? 'cause I've been feeling for a while like maybe this ain't just about him. Like maybe it's about something else."

A long silence. It winds tight, Beth thinks. Tight like an over-stressed guitar string. Liable to snap. Then, still cold: "It's got nothin' to do with you."

"Fine. So get over it, then. We got bigger problems than whatever you're dragging around."

Another cry from upstairs and she jumps slightly, shakes herself and scrubs a hand over her face. She shouldn't. Shouldn't eavesdrop. It's only stressing her out even worse, and it's not her business.

 _Yeah, you know that's not true,_ Maggie whispers just behind her ear. _It's_ all _your business now. Has to be. You're tangled up in this thing, and you better get some kind of hold on it or it'll choke you. You can't afford to_ not _make it your business._

 _And do you believe him? Really?_

No. She doesn't. Reaching the landing, trying to muffle her steps over the creaking wood, and swallowing against the dense fear abruptly rising in her chest like bile. It's all going wrong, wrong in ways she can't grasp or even see with any degree of clarity, and she doesn't know how to stop any of it. Not that it was _right_ before, but this…

She doesn't believe Shane. But Rick does. Or is making himself believe.

 _He's too close. There are things he's not seeing._

What things?

 _I don't know._

Downstairs, the front door opens and closes again. She stops again halfway down the hall and listens until Daryl's bike growls awake outside, swells and then swiftly recedes. His bow. He left it at the Frithus. She utters a silent prayer to whoever is in a receptive mood that he'll have the presence of mind to head there and get it first.

It's like an echo of how things went before, a ghost. The door to the nursery ajar at the end of the hall, now faint warm light spilling out and inviting. The gentle hum of Lori singing and Judith's hitching sigh beneath. Beth halts with her hand on the doorframe and watches Lori standing by the window with Judith in her arms, illuminated by an unseen lamp. She's turning slowly in place, swaying like a teenager making a first awkward attempt at dancing with a boy, except there's nothing awkward about it. Her movements are smooth, somehow graceful even if there aren't very many of them. Her entire body is a rocking cradle.

Beth draws a breath and holds it. She never saw her own mother like this. But once, not long before the fire - and prompted by something she no longer remembers - she thought about the baby Maggie might someday have, and the strange and yet not unappealing idea of her mother as a _grand_ mother. What that might be like. How it might look.

The baby Maggie never had. Never will have. The baby her mother will never hold. None of it will happen now.

 _Except._

Her hand lowers to her belly, lays against the flatness there. She shouldn't want this. It's a crazy thing to want. She recognizes it as an instinct and a new one, planted in her like a seed by everything else that's happening to her now. She's eighteen. She's an orphan who barely graduated high school. The world is ending. It doesn't matter what kind of argument she made to Daryl: she absolutely should not want to have a baby.

She does. Desperately.

It should be freaking her out so much more than it is.

"Honey?" Lori, facing the door and looking at her with a faint, tired smile. "C'mon in. Rick send you up here?"

"Daryl." She steps into the room, still feeling like she's intruded on something. Like she's being rude somehow, regardless of Lori's welcome. She looks at Judith, the tiny curled hand at the base of Lori's throat and the wispy hair on top of her head, and looks away. "He said you'd put me somewhere."

"He… Oh." Confusion, immediately followed by comprehension. "Right. You can't exactly curl up on the floor with the others. The couch'll do fine, but the pillows are lumpy as hell. Let me just put Judi down and I'll get you some different ones. And a blanket."

"You don't-"

"Sure I do. Not like it's a hassle." She laughs a bit dryly as she turns to the crib and leans down to lay Judith carefully into it. "I think we've already had the hassle for tonight."

Beth's gaze strays to the clock sitting on the low dresser, set into the wide belly of a robin. After three now. She releases a sigh, guilt suddenly plucking at her. "Sorry."

"Don't be ridiculous. What do you have to be sorry for?" Lori straightens up and starts for the door, casting a look over her shoulder. "It's not like _you_ strolled into town looking to-" She stops, staring at Beth - at her arm, and only then does Beth remember.

The sigil. The bleeding stopped hours ago, and the few twinges of pain have been easy to ignore, but now, when she looks down at it, the sight that greets her isn't pretty. The edges of the cuts are crusted black with blood, more dried blood smearing her skin. It appears, in fact, a lot worse than she knows it is, and she raises her head, ready to insist that it's not actually that bad - but Lori is already taking her other wrist, tugging her gently but firmly down the hall toward the bathroom.

"You don't have to tell me. I know what it is, I know it's fine. You should clean it, though. I've got some Neosporin."

She doesn't put up any resistance when Lori presses her down onto the toilet and rummages in the medicine cabinet for gauze and said Neosporin, and she holds obediently still as Lori crouches in front of her and begins to swab the cuts. It stings and she hisses, smiles ruefully.

"Guess there's some magic I'm never gonna be all that good at."

"Blood magic always hurts. That's the point." Lori glances up, eyes deep and expression serious. "It's not just the blood, Beth. It's the pain. You're giving something of yourself. That's why it's powerful."

Beth bites her lip. This isn't a comforting line of conversation. "Pain is powerful?"

"Mmhm." Lori uncaps the Neosporin, starts to spread it over the wound. "Pain is the strongest magic. Sacrifice. Yours. Someone else's. Think about everything you know about history, about religion. See a pattern?"

"Yeah," Beth murmurs. She does. It's not hard to see. Starving mystics and fasting monks, zealots flogging themselves with braided whips. Beating hearts in the bloody hands of priests, Isaac bound on the altar, Christ nailed to the cross. Wars to end wars. Death to stop death. A world soaked in blood.

And the worst thing about it is that sometimes, it works.

"It's the strongest. It's also the most dangerous, when it's strong enough. This is small. Easy to control." She gets to her feet. "Anyway, all done. Let's get you settled."

* * *

Beth doesn't know if the couch is genuinely as comfortable as it feels, or if she's sufficiently tired that anything would be. But even so, lying in the dark living room with the soft, oddly comforting snores of three wolves on the floor nearby and the house so quiet all around her, sleep darts away from her every time she tries to approach it. Lori helped, but in her experience the hours just before first light tend to be the worst for worrying, somehow the most conducive to her mind's habit of gnawing at itself like a loose cuticle.

She stares at the room's big front window, the dim glow of a streetlight at the bottom of the driveway. She stares until the shadows seem to churn and seethe, to gather into semi-cohesive forms that lurk just beyond her field of vision. She was told that for now she's safest here, and maybe that's true, but _safest_ doesn't mean _safe._

Lying in her bed with Daryl, telling him that he was going to have to mate with her eventually, that they had no choice, that she _wanted_ him to, she said that she was never safe. That nothing was safe. That it's all dangerous now. She knew, when she looked into his sharp wolf eyes, that it was true. She'd seen monsters. Fought them. Run from them, run through fire, run for her life. She had seen something even more terrible, terrible beyond her comprehension - that massive dark tower, and the tiny red figure standing on its balcony. She said it was all dangerous, and it is.

But she didn't know. Even then, she didn't really know how much.

 _I still don't._

 _Not yet._


	47. let's pray for something

**Note:** This is where I start something I've been agonizing over for literally weeks, and I'm pretty nervous about it. All I can do is what I've done before, which is ask you to trust me. I hope that by now I've earned it, and I hope I don't end up betraying it here.

...Yeah, that's very ominous. Sorry. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 47: let's pray for something to feel good in the morning**

Later that morning, Beth wakes up alone in the living room, staggers - yawning and desperately wanting a shower and a change of clothes - into the kitchen, and meets Carl.

Though of course it's only a little while after that she learns his name.

Carl is a teenager, and as far as she can see he falls way on the younger end of the teenager spectrum. He's sitting at the breakfast table in a fall of bright sunshine and crunching down some Cocoa Puffs and messing with his phone. He looks up at her when she enters, pushes his tousled brown hair back from his face, and scans her up and down in silence. His face is difficult to read.

Beth can see traces of Rick in his eyes. That sharp watchfulness. "Hi," she offers, a bit uncertain, and the boy gives her a short nod and goes back to his phone.

She glances up at a clock on the wall over the dishwasher - about 10:15 - and wonders for a few muddled seconds why he's not in school until she remembers that today is Saturday.

"Where's your mom and dad?"

Carl looks up again. "Dad's out with the others. Mom's upstairs." He pauses, tilts his chin at the box of cereal. "Want some?"

She does. She realizes it all at once: she's absolutely starving, her stomach feeling like it's in the middle of a slow motion implosion, and she flashes him a quick smile and breathes a laugh. "Yeah, that'd be… That'd be great."

He gestures toward a cabinet by the sink with his spoon. "Bowls are over there, spoons are in the top drawer under. I'm Carl," he adds, almost sounding like an afterthought, and she feels his gaze tracking her as she goes to the cabinet. It doesn't especially bother her. This is his territory. She's a stranger, welcomed by his parents or not. She'll have to demonstrate trustworthiness before he'll be willing to grant her his trust.

Fair.

"Beth," she says as she slides into the chair next to him and picks up the box.

"I know. Mom told me." He continues watching her as she fills her bowl and grabs the milk, tries not to let her hunger push her into moving too fast. "You're a witch."

The word startles her and she freezes, spoon in her hand, staring at him. Almost immediately she realizes that it _shouldn't_ startle her, that in fact she should get used to it, but how do you get used to that? To hearing it said like that, so matter-of-fact, like an observation regarding the color of her hair or eyes? Regardless of whatever else she's getting used to.

 _Witch._

"Yeah," she says softly. "Yeah, I guess I am."

"You either are or you're not." Carl's tone is gently amused.

"Well, then, I am." She gives him another faint smile, and just like that she can feel him relaxing. Starting to, anyway. "I just found out, I'm kinda still… gettin' comfortable with it."

"It's weird," Carl agrees. "For a lotta reasons. So you can do magic?" New interest is flashing into his voice and eyes. "Like, more than we can?"

She shrugs. "That's what they tell me. I'm still learnin', though. I pretty much can't do anythin' big right now."

 _Except by accident._

"But you will."

She spoons cereal into her mouth, jettisoning manners and answering while chewing. "Hope so." She's quiet for a moment, ruminating - and then something strikes her with what feels nearly like literal impact, and she jerks her head up.

Rick is _with the others._ If something bad had happened, something with Glenn and Daryl, surely Carl would have said something. Wouldn't Carl know? He's a kid, sure, but clearly keen, and kids always see and know more than adults think they do.

So wouldn't he?

"Glenn and Daryl went out," she says slowly, and she thinks she actually manages to sound sort of casual. "Did they come back? Are they alright?"

"Think so." Carl has returned his attention to his phone, flicking through a game she doesn't recognize involving shifting colored dots. "Dad was goin' out with the others to meet 'em. That's what he said, anyway."

 _Why the fuck didn't anyone_ tell _me?_ It comes very close to bursting out of her, but she stops herself in time. Her irritation is fair, but she can see why, can see how Rick or Lori might interpret leaving her alone as consideration. No emergency or disaster, nothing to wake her up for; she was clearly exhausted so let her sleep. Fill her in whenever she regains consciousness.

"At the Frithus?" she asks, following an intuition.

Carl nods, still not looking up.

"He say anythin' about what they're gonna do?"

Carl raises his eyes, arching a brow. "Why would he tell me anything about that? Anyway, I think that's what they're meeting for."

"Oh." Makes sense. She's slightly embarrassed; it was an obvious conclusion and not a necessary question. Meditative, she goes back to the vitally important task of eating, feeling the cuts on her arm itch and her eyes still throbbing gently with the depth of her sleep.

She'll chalk it up to barely being conscious.

She works her way through the rest of her cereal in silence, pours herself another bowl, eats that too. Carl sits with her, without comment or any attempt at conversation, but she senses nevertheless that he's keeping her company, at least in part, and she appreciates the kindness. At some point toward the end of the second bowl, the creaking of the stairs announces Lori's approach, and she gives Beth a small, warm smile as she comes in with Judith against her shoulder.

"You're up. And you met Carl."

"Yep. He gave me breakfast."

"And she wouldn't even do any magic for me." Again that gentle amusement, and an equally gentle spark of teasing in his eyes. He pushes out of his chair, stretches, starts toward the door. "I'm goin' out for a ride, Mom."

"Stay close to the house this time," Lori calls after him, though he's already in the hall and doesn't respond. Lori sighs, gives Beth a look, and with her free hand she pulls a high chair set against the wall up to the table and slides Judith into it. Judith stares at Beth with enormous eyes and slaps at the tray with both hands, chuckling.

"If you really want a kid, you should know what you're in for." Lori fetches a spoon and a jar of baby food from a cabinet, returns and sinks into the chair across from Beth. "They don't stay little and cute forever."

Beth releases a low laugh, reaches out and lets Judith grab at her fingers. Such tiny hands. Tiny chubby perfect hands, and surprisingly strong when one closes around her forefinger and squeezes. "But you have two of 'em."

"Yeah," Lori says softly. She pauses in the act of unscrewing the jar's lid, her expression suddenly unfocused, distant. The hint of a strange melancholy as the light catches her eyes. Beth feels a prickle of guilt, watching her, though she's uncertain what exactly she's feeling guilty for. It's not as if she knows the source of that melancholy.

Though now that she thinks about it, maybe she can take a guess. Given what she _does_ know. About Hathsta, and about their children.

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah," Lori repeats, snapping back into herself; the word is cheerful, but there's a firmness in the cheer and in her smile that isn't altogether convincing. She appears to know it, because the mask falters seconds later and the sun in her recedes behind the cloud. "It's just… Honestly? We wanted more."

This isn't surprising. If anything it's a confirmation of the guess she would make. "You can't have any more?

"Didn't even think we'd have Judi. She's our little miracle." Lori strokes a hand over Judith's head, smoothing her downy hair. "We got lucky with Carl pretty early on, but it took a lot of trying for her. And obviously we couldn't just adopt. That wasn't the point. I mean, it _was…_ But it also wasn't."

"You were trying to have… Not a human. An actual Hathsta." There's a word - she knows she's heard Daryl say it - but it's eluding her, and she frowns as Judith continues to toy with her fingers. Though now that Lori is talking about it on her own, the guilt is fading.

"An eafora. Yes. But those are happening less and less. It's getting hard to have kids at all. We think Judi might be it for us." Lori looks at Judith in silence for a moment, tracing the edge of the jar's lid. "You know, before we lost contact with all the other cyne, I heard about some mothers thinking they were failures if they never had an eafora. Cyne refusing to accept children. Exiling their parents. Crazy things." She pushes her hair back from her face and gives Beth a tight smile. "Guess that's just how people get when they're scared enough."

"Of dyin'."

"Of everything." Lori holds out the jar and spoon, and her mouth is relaxing. Easing away from whatever deeper shadows she was sliding toward. "Hey… You want to feed her?"

Something blooms in Beth's chest, warm and sweet and soaked in the light pouring through the window. Judith bats at a loose strand of her hair and laughs. Maybe she should be afraid of this, sure, but it's hard to be afraid of something that's making her so happy.

It seems like a bad idea to reject anything that makes her happy, these days.

"Yeah." She takes the jar, the spoon. Mashed carrots. Somehow, in a way she can't begin to define, that's perfect. "I really would."

* * *

The cyne comes back a couple of hours later. They all look tense and unhappy, so essentially the way they looked the last time Beth saw them. Daryl especially, trailing behind the rest - more than tense, more than unhappy. He's pulled inward, shoulders hunched and head down, and he pauses just inside the front door where she's come to let them in, looking at her and then away with eyes half obscured by his hair.

She doesn't say anything. She takes his hand, and she waits, breath held tight in her throat.

"We're goin' in," he says finally, still not looking at her. From the kitchen drifts the hum of instinct conversation. "Tonight. Assumin' they're there. Glenn's stakin' out the place."

She releases her held breath, though the tightness doesn't escape with it. "I'm goin' with you."

"Beth-"

"I'm _goin'._ " She lets his hand slip from hers, crosses her arms. She doesn't _want_ to, is the thing. She doesn't want any of them to be doing this. Yes, she sees why. No, she doesn't have any argument against it that truly satisfies her, or that she would expect to hold water with any of them. But they shouldn't.

They just shouldn't.

He gazes down at her for a long moment, teeth working at his lips and anxiety tugging his features in multiple directions. He's fighting with himself. He's fighting with everything, and it hurts her to see it, and she doesn't know how to make it stop.

"Magden," he murmurs. " _Agendfra_. Look, you know I can't stop you. You say you're comin'... Maybe Rick would, but I wouldn't." He stops, looking helplessly at her, and the implications of what he's _not_ saying are perfectly clear. It's all becoming perfectly clear, more and more of it revealed all the time, and the picture is an upsetting one. Worse than she could have imagined. Not just her will trampling his, but her will using him to trample _everything._ Him facing down Rick, facing down the entire fucking cyne, because what she says conflicts with what they say.

She could, if she chose, set him against his whole family, and there's nothing he could do about it. She could rip him apart inside and he would have no defense.

She wrestles back a shudder. _I don't want a slave._

Except neither of them is free anymore.

 _That's what love is._

"Please." His voice falls into a whisper, strained. "Please stay here. Agendfra, please do that for me."

She lowers her head, presses her fingertips against her eyes. God, she wants to crawl out of her own skin and run, leave it behind her like a snake.

"Stay _here?_ "

"With Lori and the kids. You'll be safe, this place is warded to hell and back."

Another long silence. Not for deliberation. She already knows what she's going to say, her eyes locked on the wood grain of the floor, the woven blue and white loops in the rug under her feet. Hugging herself again, feeling the pressure of his desperate attention. If by some untapped magic she could seize him and fling them both back to a few days ago, to bed or his bike or even the frustration and tedium of her magic lessons, she would carve a hundred sigils into her flesh to harness it.

But of course she can't. She doubts very much that the magic needed for it even exists, let alone would ever be accessible to her.

In the end, she can't fix anything.

She looks up at him, struggling past an unwelcome prickle of tears. Not now. She can't afford the luxury of it. "I wanna go to my place, get some clothes. Toothbrush." She shrugs, sighing. "Y'know."

He nods, inclines his head toward the door. He doesn't appear at all relieved. "C'mon."

* * *

Even gripped by misery or fear, the bike has always been someplace she could escape into. Not that it can outrun whatever is eating away at her, but it might be a bit like that. The wind and the speed sweeps it back like her hair and she loses herself in Daryl's broad solidity and the strength of the muscle against her chest and cheek and within the circle of her arms, and for a short while it all feels bearable. And that happens again this time as they hurtle past the wide lawns and small woods of the Grimes's neighborhood and back onto city streets flowing with the lazy traffic of an early Saturday afternoon, but the effect is less potent than before. It's all still there, clinging to her shoulder like a malevolent little imp, and its needle-sharp kitten claws are digging into her more than she thinks they should.

Nothing she can do right now, but that doesn't help.

He's silent when he pulls to a stop outside her building, silent as he follows her inside and up the stairs and through her door, silent as he watches her rummage through her dresser and stuff clothes into an elderly backpack.

The same pack she brought to Atlanta, carrying everything that remained of her life. Or at least everything she cared to keep.

But it's only a few minutes before one of the things with its claws in her finally takes on too concrete a form for her to ignore any longer, and she straightens up, holding a pair of socks, and turns to him.

"Are you gonna kill your brother?"

Daryl blinks at her for a second or two, then makes an awful choked noise and jerks his face away.

She's ruthless. She hates herself a little. But she has to know. "Are you?"

"I dunno," he breathes. "I don't want to."

"If one of the others does?"

He clenches his jaw, gaze fixed on the window. Clouds are beginning to gather outside, low and moving fast between the roofs across the street. "They'll do what they gotta do."

It's not just between her and them. It slams into her so hard she nearly gasps, as ruthless as she is. The uniqueness of what he's suffering. Not just between her and them, but her and them and his last remaining blood. Everything he wanted to find for decades. He found it, and in its cruel ignorance it put a gun to his head.

Eostre's voice, echoing sadly through her dreams. _His life has been hard, and what remains of it isn't going to get any easier._

She drops the socks and goes to him.

She doesn't want to mate with him here, like this, with that horrible internal war behind his eyes. It might make a lot of sense to do it now, fuck him like an army wife on the last night before her husband ships out - strip him and herself and drop to the floor like she did the first night she began to embrace what this is, her ass high and her cunt soaked and ready for him, and take him in. Now, _now,_ because the truth is that they might not get another chance, him snarling and driving into her and ending at least one of the things that's tormenting him.

But it feels wrong.

Instead she drags him to the bathroom.

She cuts the shower on and does strip him, does strip herself, and tugs him under the spray. Shoves him back against the tile and wraps her slippery hand around his cock and jerks him until he's clutching at her and whining her name, thrusting clumsily into her fist and begging her to let him come - to _let him,_ like she's told him he needs her permission, and it turns out she _really_ fucking likes that, heat flooding into her pussy and making her feel swollen and almost bruised. Aching so bad for him. Fumbling for his hand and dragging it between her legs, rolling in time with the firm quick motions of her fist and swallowing his moans as they mingle with hers.

 _Yeah, you can. Oh my God, Daryl, come for me._

The sob that breaks out of him is broken by his waves of trembling, mouth open against her jaw, and it seems to pulse from him into her, pulling her with him in a single violent surge. She grinds against his furiously working fingers and closes her teeth on the base of his throat as he spills warm and slick over her hand and washes away, and she doesn't even know who's groaning, who's crying out, how to find the barrier between them anymore.

Until he's falling against her, all rough panting and every muscle loose. Somehow she has the strength to hold him up.

She leans her head on his chest and blinks as water drips from her lashes. Each drop unravels the light, bends and warps it. She thinks vaguely of the end of the world, that endless sea of indescribable brilliance, the universes rising and falling like the backs of surfacing whales, angels soaring above it with their terrible beauty searing her mind.

He whispers her name. She closes her eyes and all she sees is a deep bloody red, like a single petal of an enormous rose.

* * *

She stands at the window and watches them go.

Daryl's bike and Rick's car, the roar of the bike's engine and the flash of headlights as the SUV backs out of the driveway. There hadn't been a lengthy goodbye. Lori hadn't said much. Carl's feelings about the whole thing had been difficult to discern, but Beth had sensed that he wasn't thrilled.

Then again, no one is.

Quiet dinner, a final brief conference, then they were gone. Beth watches them until they've vanished from view, then turns and heads into the living room, sinks down onto the couch with her hands clasped between her knees. With a twinge in her gut, she wonders what the hell she's supposed to do with the time, what might prevent her from going slowly insane.

Suddenly she wants a cigarette, _bad,_ and she didn't think to bring any.

Lori is curled in an armchair, reading a paperback with a title Beth can't make out, and not for the first time there's something about the quality of the lamplight and the simple attractiveness of the furnishings, the warm neat comfort of it all, that twists an aching knot into Beth's chest. Home. Actual _home._ So much more familiar in its way than the dim, cramped little room in which she's spent the last few months of her life. Everything she's lost.

Past and future.

Lori must be able to detect her attention, because after a moment or two she glances up, her brow furrowed in mild concern. "You okay, honey?"

"Is it worth it?"

It blurts out of her, and it sounds ragged in her own ears - _feels_ ragged, as if it's gone through a lot to get free. She gapes at the words, not least because shouldn't the answer be obvious? Hasn't she already settled on it? That it's worth whatever risk everyone thinks there is in the merging of the two things that have been remaking them from the inside out. That it's worth whatever they end up suffering as a result.

That she would give everything for him.

Yet she's asking.

Lori doesn't request clarification. She also doesn't answer right away. She studies Beth with slightly narrowed eyes, thoughtful, and once again Beth thinks she can see a shadow passing behind her face. That pain. Even if it's worth it, one thing she's been certain of for some time now: nothing about it is easy.

Nothing ever is.

"It hurts," Lori says finally, softly, her book resting face-down on her thigh. She tucks a lock of dark hair behind her ear. "It's hard. I thought…" She drops her gaze to her curled fingers, picking at the edge of one of her nails. "I thought I would have this whole other life. Normal. Y'know? Then _he_ happened." She smiles, both pained and fond, and what comes of the combination is something Beth recognizes down to her marrow. "I didn't have a choice anymore."

 _I know._ "Did you want one?"

"Not really. That's the thing. I wanted him. I wanted kids. I wanted a family. I wanted this life. Even when I didn't _want_ to want it, I did." Lori is quiet a moment, then sets the book on the arm of the chair and pushes to her feet, walking to the front window and staring out at the night with her hands cupping her elbows. Beth watches her, the way the distant light from the street lines her profile. She looks tired and worried, and very beautiful.

"This kind of love," she says. "It changes you. There's no difference between you and it. And don't think it's this… perfect, harmonious thing." She shoots Beth a wry smile. "We fight. He makes me so mad sometimes. Sometimes it's because he _won't_ fight. He just pulls back and shuts down, like… Like he's afraid of something. I feel like I have to break my way in. It's love, Beth. It's a mess."

Beth laughs thinly. "Everythin's a mess."

"Yeah. It is." Lori exhales, and as her eyes slip half closed she shivers. There are a hundred things in that fine flutter of her muscles, tangled, intertwined, glimpsed by Beth only in fragments that pluck at her lungs. A huge mess.

Existence.

"It's worth it," Lori breathes, and nods as if confirming it - to herself more than to Beth. Beth is filled with the overwhelming sensation that she might as well not be here, that she's seeing a woman asking and answering her own question. And not for anything like the first time.

She faces Beth again, smiling. No longer wry. "It's the best thing that ever happened to me."

And that's when the shooting starts.


	48. black night is fallen

**Note:** I've been ominous about this for a few days now, and trust me, it's not just me being a jerk. It's been me genuinely wrestling with stuff. Like I said, I've been agonizing about this for literally weeks, and please believe that it's not a decision I made lightly or easily. I'm upset about it.

I promise that I'm not doing it for no reason. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 48: black night is fallen**

Later, Beth will wonder if maybe she would have moved faster, if it hadn't been guns. If maybe she would have been more prepared, on some level, for an attack of Ytend, or some kind of magic. Fire, ice, brilliant light. Snaking bolts of lightning. Any number of things far less mundane that nevertheless fit her life so much better as it is now.

The shooting starts, and a bullet screams past her ear. She turns, staring numbly at where it carved through the air, and just behind her and to the right a lamp shatters, plunging the room into dimness only kept from the dark by the light in the hallway. Vaguely she thinks that dimness might be good.

Dimness might be cover.

Then something solid and heavy slams into her side and knocks her to the floor, falling on top of her and digging shockingly strong fingers into her shoulder. Hissing in her ear, Lori: " _Get down._ "

Something else warm and sticky on her cheek. Beth glances up, sees a dark line of blood trickling down the side of Lori's throat, and ice encases her own, numbing her tongue.

The firing starts fresh, the shots coming in such rapid succession that it sounds almost like the thunder of Daryl's bike. Lori is pushing at her, herding her roughly forward toward the back of the sofa. "Crawl. Keep your head down, if you like it where it is."

Beth crawls. Still numb, still operating essentially on dull autopilot, and a muffled part of her is furious with herself. She should do something. She has no idea what, what's happening is a frantically tangled mystery, but the feeling that she should _do something_ hammers at the inside of her head. She threw fire at Ytend. Why the fuck isn't she doing that here? Why isn't she doing _anything?_

Instead Lori is pressing her back against the wall, out of any clear line of sight of the windows, raking her dark hair back from her face and panting adrenaline. "It's impossible," she mutters, head craning, staring toward the unseen front window. "It's _impossible._ The wards…"

"What do we do?"

"There's a gun. Rick keeps a spare in the bedroom. It's not loaded, but the bullets are right there in the same drawer. If we can get to it…" Lori jerks her head in the opposite direction, toward the entranceway to the front hall - and the stairs. Beth sorts wildly through her mental map of the house's layout, the placement of the windows. The route they would have to take. Depending on the angle, they could be spotted from either the living or the dining room windows. Only for a few seconds, if they move fast, but.

Alternatives? No. There aren't any. Not that she knows of.

Carl's voice from upstairs, strong but shaking with fear. Judith is starting to cry. "Mom?"

"Stay up there, baby. Stay away from the windows." Lori pauses, hauls in a breath, yells again. "Get Judith and get in your bedroom closet. Fast, you understand?"

No response, but the thump of footfalls down the hall. Lori looks up as if she can follow Carl's progress through the ceiling, and she heaves another breath when the pitch of Judith's crying changes, jittering slightly as she's being lifted and moved. More footfalls, jogging. A door slamming closed. Lori closes her eyes, and more bullets cascade the ringing of shattering glass all around them.

"We need to get word to them." Lori opens her eyes again, and they're blazing as she locks Beth's gaze with hers. "You still have your phone?"

"I-" Beth lifts her hip, gropes in the pocket of her jeans. Bulge of it; she drags it out with shaking hands and automatically dials from memory, praying Rick has his cell with him.

Nothing. Not even ringing.

She lowers the phone and looks helplessly at Lori. "They're blockin' it somehow."

She doesn't understand how it's happened, how they slipped by - and one obvious explanation isn't something she can even entertain - but she doesn't need to see _them_ to know who _they_ are.

" _Shit._ " Lori slams a fist into the wall, counterpoint to the gunshots. "Had a feeling. Try texting. Probably won't work, but… Try."

Beth types, hits _send,_ and a few seconds later she raises the phone to show Lori the error message. Lori nods, mouth tight, and nods toward the entranceway and the hall beyond.

"When I say _go,_ we're gonna run for the stairs. You go first, quick as you can. Stay low. Once you get upstairs, you get to the bedroom, get flat on the floor. Keep the bed between you and the windows. Wait for me there, I'll be right behind you. Got it?"

"Got it." It rides out in an exhalation that rasps over her throat like sandpaper. Somehow she's breathless already, that muffled yet furious part of her mind searching for anything more than her fear. The fire again, how to get it into her hands. Some kind of barrier. Something like the sigil, invisibility, camouflage, even though now that she's trying to recall the sigil itself she's turning up only a stubborn blank.

 _Got it. Run._

" _Go._ "

Beth goes. She doesn't think, shoves every fragment of her scrambling brain aside in favor of forward motion, thrusting herself to her feet and bent as low as she can without toppling over. Even so, she almost slips on the corner of the rug in the hall and catches herself on one hand, the soles of her boots squealing like tires on a wet road, and she would swear she feels a bullet part strands of her hair as it slices through the air just above her. Something else shatters behind and she hears Lori's grunt over her shoulder, a hand slapping at her ass and driving her up the stairs on all fours, and then she's in the upstairs hall and tearing down it toward the master bedroom, hitting the floor so hard her lungs empty in a barking cough.

A body tumbling to the floor beside her. Lori is gripping her shoulder again, and Beth swings her head to the side to see her: Lori is flushed, her hair and eyes wild, the neckline of her shirt soaked dark red.

It's probably not as bad as it looks. Probably.

 _Please._

The firing has ceased. Judith has stopped crying - or Carl is successfully hiding most of the noise.

"I'm going for the gun." Lori gestures at the opposite side of the bed. "You stay." And before Beth can say anything, Lori is sliding clumsily under the bed, dragging herself through clumps of dust and out the other side, pushing up to her knees. There's the scraping sound of a drawer opening, a rattle, and she drops again, a small pistol in one hand and a box of what Beth guesses must be ammunition in the other.

Still no firing. But shouts now, harsh and nastily gleeful, and if she had any doubt before…

They got out, the Hunters. They killed some of the cyne - the conviction won't let up. They killed _all_ of the cyne and they got out, and they're here to finish the job. Beth clenches her jaw so hard she feels her teeth shift in their sockets, and holds Lori's icy gaze as Lori starts to slide back under the bed.

"Your neighbors have to hear," Beth whispers. "Right? They'll hear, they'll call the police-"

Something in Lori's expression stops her cold, words trapped in her throat, and just then there's a splintering crash downstairs as the front door caves in.

Once again, she doesn't need to see it in order to know.

Joe's voice echoing up the stairs, infernally good-natured and as calm as if he's an expected guest: "C'mon out, now, sweetheart. You and the brats. C'mon out and it won't hurt a bit." Cackling. "We're nice enough fellas when you get to know us, ain't we, gentlemen?"

"Get in the closet." Despair weaves through Lori's voice like barbed wire. Halfway under the bed, she's struggling to load the gun with quivering hands. "You stab anything that comes in that isn't me. _Get._ "

Beth shakes her head, beginning to push herself up, feeling for the hilt of her knife. If the magic has deserted her, she still has that, and she can still do damage. "I can _fight,_ Lori, I can help-"

" _Don't argue with me, Beth._ "

All her protests dry up and scatter like dead leaves. She swallows and scrambles backward, making for the closet she knows is there, reaching up to fumble one-handed at the knob and all the time thinking _you coward, you useless fucking COWARD._

She's not a witch. Now, when she needs it perhaps more than she ever has since her life burned to the ground, she can't find any magic anywhere in herself. Not a spark, not a flicker.

She's just a scared little girl.

The last thing she sees before she slams the closet door closed is Lori retreating to the far side of the bed, putting it between herself and the door to the hall, gun raised to aim. Then there's only darkness broken into thin bands by the light through the door's slats, a faint whiff of mothballs and the leather-rubber smell of shoes, the corners of boxes digging into her spine and hanging clothes tickling the sides of her face. She clutches her knife, breathes - stops breathing as her lungs snap into twin icebergs.

For a single bizarre moment that stretches out and out: silence.

Then rapid, heavy footsteps thudding up the stairs, multiple sets, thundering down the hall. A scuffle and another thud, Carl's angry yell and Judith's wailing, laughter rising over both of them - _Heya, Joe, I caught me a puppy!_ \- and Lori is shrieking rage as the gun goes off once, again, a third time and a man yells and hisses a string of brutal curses. Stomping boots and more splintering wood, and this time Lori's cry is broken and pained as what has to be the gun clatters to the floor, yet more curses and barks to _calm the fuck down, bitch, or I'll fuckin' scalp you_.

Beth is on her feet as the door wrenches open and light explodes in on her.

She catches a blurred, chaotic glimpse of mean eyes, ugly sneering mouths, big hands grabbing for her. She slashes blindly at them, snarling like a she-wolf, and she has time to take satisfaction in a resulting jagged yelp before bright hot agony lances into her skull, an impact that shatters the world.

 _I'm shot,_ she thinks calmly. _They shot me. They shot me in the goddamn head. All the shit I've been through, and this is how it ends._

 _And I'm going to die a virgin._

She wants to laugh.

Then she doesn't want to do anything at all.

* * *

"Rise and shine, cunt."

At first Beth doesn't even register the pain. All she feels is the impact against her cheek, the flat _smack_ singing in her ears and a flood of heat into her face. Then it collides with her nerves like a shockwave and she's aware of a separate cascade of bee stings all over her scalp. A wrench in her neck. She's being dragged up by her fucking _hair,_ dragged ruthlessly back into an equally ruthless consciousness, and she hisses, attempting to grope at whoever it is-

She can't move her hands. Her arms, pulled behind her. They meet resistance when she tries, thin and cutting rough-edged into her wrists.

Zip ties.

The world is a muddy red, the sounds all around her also muddy, and as her hair is released and she comes to an unsteady rest on her knees, she manages to unstick her eyelids and focus - partially. It's something.

Sensory input penetrates bit by bit, not only sight but sound, touch. What feels like cool grass under her; they're not inside anymore. Glow to her left; she recognizes it as the porch light, seconds before the porch itself becomes visible. Ahead and to the right, light far more harshly brilliant; she can't look directly at it, but in the periphery of her vision she can perceive the outlines of chrome, oily black metal. The headlight of a bike.

How the fuck didn't they _hear?_

Surrounding her: dark, looming shapes. Human. Men. Shifting back and forth like shadows. Judith snuffling somewhere, a grunt that has to come from Carl. Beth turns her head in the direction of the noise and squints, sees him on his knees not far away, hair obscuring his eyes. He lifts his head and his gaze meets hers, shining with tears, and she can practically feel the terror he's fighting to conceal as if it's her own. Packing it down under his rage - rage that looks every bit as strong.

For half a second she wishes she had something to say, some kind of reassurance. Some kind of comfort to offer him. But her sense reasserts itself: Carl isn't a fool. He has to be able to read the situation. Any comfort she might offer him would only insult him.

He has to know that they're probably about to die.

Abruptly, the sound of a struggle from a point beyond the light - boots scuffling on the driveway pavement, a woman's ragged, coughing cry, a man's deep growl. "I swear to _Christ,_ you dirty goddamn dog-fucker, I will break both your _arms_ if you don't settle down." And Lori stumbles through the light as the Weasel Man shoves her forward onto the lawn by her bound wrists, keeping her on her feet. Her shirt is ripped across the bloodstained neckline, more blood streaming from a fresh cut on her brow, but when her blazing eyes land on Carl and on Beth, all the blood seems to drain from her face.

The looming shapes are crowding in, fragments of their features caught by the headlight's beam. Eagerness, glittering excitement, and Beth thinks of predators circling their prey. Not wolves; she can't think of wolves like this. Something far nastier, far more cruel.

Ytend. This is a pack of human Ytend. The forms are different, but their spirits are exactly the same.

Three of them are holding rifles. She sees handguns. One of them is slapping what appears to be a pipe rhythmically into his palm. Too close, the gleam of a long blade.

She can't see Merle.

Fire, fire, _fire,_ the magic, where _is it,_ why the fuck is she so _empty,_ why the fuck is she so _cold._

"Hold her, Len." Joe. Joe approaching as Len swings Lori around toward him. He's blotting out much of the light as he steps in front of it, his face thrown almost entirely into shadow but for the amiable edge of his smile.

He's carrying Judith in his arms.

"Well, well, well." He stops less than a foot from Lori, and even if Beth can't see his gaze clearly, she can feel it move from Lori to her to Carl, like a greasy hand on her burning cheek. "Beautiful family you got. Just beautiful. Leave it to fuckin' Beaver out here." He laughs, and it's horrible. "Ain't exactly a beaver, but you get what I'm sayin', right? Course you do."

"If you hurt them," Lori says softly. "If you hurt them, you sick fuck, you're going to learn a whole new _definition_ of sorry."

Ripple of pleased laughter, and Lori winces when Len jerks her arms further behind her back. But she stands, glaring - afraid, but it doesn't seem to matter. Her fear is like an afterthought. It's there, but it isn't reaching the core of her.

Maybe she's not Hathsta. But she might as well be.

Joe cocks his head, rocking Judith slightly as she whimpers. "How's that, then? No one can hear you, bitch. No one's comin' for you. We veiled this whole place. From the outside it looks and sounds just as quiet as quiet can be. We didn't want to _disturb_ your neighbors. That wouldn't be at all considerate."

Lori falters. It's only for a second, but it happens, and Beth's gut twists into several different varieties of knot. _Veiled._ That doesn't require much explanation. And it makes this whole thing and all its implications so, so much worse.

They have magic. Somehow these men have magic, and the cyne probably hadn't known that when they made their attack.

 _No one's comin' for you._

"We're gonna make this as quick and clean as possible," Joe drawls. "Normally we'd put some artistry into it, but we're here on kind of a mission, you understand? You might think of us as _exterminators._ You and your beautiful family here… You're a beautiful nest of roaches. And we gotta take care of that."

"Just try." It grates out of Carl in a growl that barely sounds like him. "Just you try it, motherfu-"

He breaks off as the man standing near him cuffs him in the temple, nearly sending him sprawling into the grass. "Shut it, you little shit."

Joe displays no sign that he heard. He lifts Judith against his chest with a hand cupping the back of her head, shushes her when she lets out a hiccuping sob, and Beth's blood crystallizes in her veins, branching all through her muscles like frost and locking them in place. Screams claw at her throat. Now. She needs it _now._ A freight train bearing utter disaster is hurtling straight toward them, blinding as that headlight, and if she can't knock it off its tracks-

 _It's too late._

 _It was too late a while ago._

"We ain't gonna make any of you suffer." Joe's voice is serene. "I'm gonna prove it to you. Set your mind at ease."

"Don't." At first Beth doesn't get it, doesn't recognize her own broken voice, but she's already speaking again. Hating it. Them. Herself. Everything. "Don't, please. _Please,_ you don't have to."

"Yeah, I do," Joe says gently. And he breaks Judith's neck.

* * *

Time falls apart.

It's the only way she can understand it. Seconds and minutes disintegrate around and inside her, and nothing is happening and everything is happening in a blur of incomprehensible simultaneity. She's not moving at all. She's surging to her feet, and she's silent while at the same time those clawing screams are ripping out of her, and Carl is quiet and motionless beside her and he's shouting and hurling himself toward Joe and collapsing as one of the men lays him out with a kick to the back of his legs, writhing in the grass, screaming as loud as Beth is

and Lori is still, all perfect beautiful stillness, and she's lunging forward, wrenching herself out of Len's grip so hard she must have dislocated at least one of her arms, and she's sinking her teeth into the side of Joe's throat

blood pouring from between her jaws and Joe dropping Judith's limp body like a rag doll into the grass and and roaring, trying to beat Lori off him and there's a gunshot crack like a lightning strike and

Lori's head snaps back in a spray of blood, a red corona pretty in the headlight's hard glow, frozen in midair and

Beth thinks of a scatter of rose petals

and Len stiffens and turns with his eyes wide and shocked and a crossbow bolt protruding from his chest, crumples to his knees and then onto his face as Joe stumbles back with a hand pressed to his throat and blood waterfalling between his fingers, shouting at them all to run, leave the rest, it's good enough, the bike thundering and the headlight swinging away and to her right briefly caught in its beam are figures loping toward them, huge, some on two legs and some on four, baying like hounds

like wolves and she sags into the grass and can't tell if she's screaming or sobbing and there probably isn't any difference that matters, the formless shape of Lori's body beside her and another little shape like a bundle very near but she can't look at that, she can't

see any of them through her tears, trying to lift her head as feet trample the grass around her, a swirling tumult of voices, some human and some not, her name and other names and hands on her pulling her up and fumbling at her wrists

and Rick's awful wail cutting through everything, not human or wolf but something hideously and completely other, something she knows in the deepest part of her because she made that sound with her father's head in her arms

and she's abruptly released and slumps back to the ground with her head against Lori's and the sharp smell of blood and it glistens like a slim river on Lori's face from the neat hole above her left eye, and then Beth knows

there's no magic, there never was any magic, it's a lie and she's a lie and she couldn't save them, she can't save anyone, laying her cheek against Lori's bloody lips and whispering into her ear _I'm sorry, I'm so sorry_ like that can fix anything, except

except

the noise of the world crashes back in on her and she's crying above it, crying through her raw throat because it's all she can do, and this doesn't mean anything and it has nothing to do with her but she has to tell them, they have to know

 _She's still breathing._


	49. the way we are tied in

**Chapter 49: the way we are tied in**

The world is still coming at her only in fragments.

Broken mirror shards, scatters of fractured reflection. Not all of it in the proper order and none of it making very much sense. Someone - no, more than that, _people_ \- dropping to the ground beside her, hands on her again and rolling her to the side. Lifting her to sit, pulling her close. The zip ties are gone and her hands move loosely, drooping; she's aware of a burning sting at her wrists. Shadows moving into and out of the light. Voices, a confusion of them, interweaving and separating and weaving again. Someone saying something about a body. Someone saying something about an ambulance. Voice shaky. Every single voice is shaky, thick with tears.

Rick.

She doesn't know if there's a word for the sounds he's making. Not in English. And she can indeed identify words, as she blinks and he takes form, kneeling in the grass beside Lori and cradling something in his arms.

 _Forhwierfan min heorte i stan._

 _Make my heart a stone._

She tries to say it again - _she's still breathing_ \- everything in her skull muddy and confused. Was she hit? Struck in the head? She can't remember. Doesn't matter. _Lori,_ they have to help Lori, she's alive right now but that could change any second, and she's wriggling in the circle of the strong arms that hold her, reaching for Lori, for Rick, but then she's being pulled to her feet, gentle but forceful, and she smells that familiar scent of smoke and leather and blood, and as Daryl leans in and speaks, her marrow turns to water in her bones.

She wants to fall against him and cry and cry and cry.

"We gotta go, Beth. We gotta go."

She manages to half turn, bewildered, attempting to catch his gaze. Beside them and in the periphery of her vision, she glimpses Michonne crouching in front of Carl, framing his face with her hands and stroking her thumbs across his cheeks. Carol is kneeling by Lori's head, brushing her hair back from her face. Shane is just standing, staring, hands hanging loose by his sides. Glenn is in the center of all of it, looking shellshocked, phone to his ear.

"The fuck are you _talkin'_ about?" It comes out in a thin rasp and it hurts her throat; perhaps she's screamed it raw. "Why do we… Daryl, what the-"

He lays his hands on her shoulders, now speaking low and urgent. "The veil they put up is fallin' apart. Cops're comin', they'll be here soon. The more of us they find here, the tougher this is gonna be to explain, so we gotta get outta sight and we gotta do it _now_."

She shakes her head, eyes wide and her jaw working. This still makes no sense. None of this makes any sense. Or if it does, it's nightmare sense, consistent only with itself and wrong in every possible respect, and she can't wake up. She glances back at Rick and Carol, at Shane - who is changing swiftly back into fierd, hunching and rising, and bending to grasp Len under the arms, lifting his dead weight easily. And all at once she gets it.

They're going to hide the body.

Daryl releases her, and seconds later he's changing too, towering over her even though he's not even standing at his full height. He touches her arm with the point of a claw, careful. Insistent.

" _The bigger Veil still protects us. If we stay out of sight, they'll avoid coming near us and they won't know why. But there's going to be a problem if we're standing here when they show up._ "

She drags in a breath and then another, staring down at the raw bands across her wrists where the ties abraded her skin. In the dimness, they look weirdly dark.

Maggie, pitiless: _Get yourself together. You remember what Daddy always said._

 _We all got jobs to do._

She nods, biting down hard on her lip, and as she lays her hand in his huge one, his swallowing hers up, she follows him numbly into the shadows of the trees.

* * *

Shane follows a minute or two later, Len's body dangling unceremoniously from one paw. The bolt is still protruding from the center of Len's chest, and before the darkness hides his face, she catches his almost comical expression of surprise. Very possibly he died before he even realized what was happening.

Too bad. She wishes he could have had ample time for it to penetrate.

Shane dumps him into a pile of leaf litter and huffs a sound that manages to convey both cold rage and utter scorn. They're standing a little way into one of the small bands of woods that cut through the neighborhood, far enough in that Beth guesses they should indeed be mostly invisible if they don't move around more than necessary. Now that the initial shock has set in - not worn off but instead knitted itself so deeply into her bones that she can't imagine it ever leaving her - everything has flattened and receded, as if she's watching a two-dimensional playback of what's already happened, standing totally outside it. Her chest is aching dully, her lungs folded around her heart. She's still crying, but it's a slow, soundless trickle. She's cold all over but she's not shivering, and it's not so much the presence of cold as it is the absence of warmth.

She's felt like this before. She was kneeling in the grass like Rick is now, holding something in her arms as the world burned to the ground behind her.

Shane meets Daryl's eyes, his own glowing mirrors, but says nothing. She detects no anger, not toward them.

She detects nothing at all.

Sirens. In the distance, through the trees, lights flashing red and blue. She turns and looks back out at the yard, Daryl a solid pillar of warmth looming silently behind her. Carol is rising, changing, dropping onto all fours and padding toward them. She's walking slowly - almost limping, as if something heavy is pressing down on her powerful back. Of the rest of the cyne, only Michonne and Glenn remain behind.

With Rick and Carl in the wreckage.

"It's wrong," Beth whispers. "We should be with them."

Carol stops in front of her, gazing at her with tear-bright eyes. " _We will be._ "

The sirens and lights are cutting through the dark, pulling up the drive, accompanied by approaching, agitated voices. Those neighbors Joe didn't want to _disturb_. The entire fucking world, flooding in to fill the empty spaces. Here, now, when it's far too late to do anything.

Except there's Lori.

Ambulance. Figures rushing toward where Rick is kneeling, bringing a stretcher with them. Carl lifting his head from Michonne's chest, scrubbing at his eyes; he looks so fucking _young_. Rick vanishes into what seems like a crowd of paramedics and Beth can't watch anymore. She totters, swings her face away, catches herself with a hand on Daryl's thickly-furred chest. Carol is beside him, paw on his shoulder, licking his muzzle and nuzzling at his jaw.

He's whimpering. Very soft, nearly inaudible, but he is.

She does what she now knows she can do and presses her face into his fur, lets the thunder of his heart pound into her head until she can haul ragged air into her lungs. All over again. It's happening all over again. She couldn't stop it before and she couldn't stop it this time either, and it's pounding into her head like Daryl's heartbeat, the pulsing bloody core of this nightmare: herself lying shot in the grass, Daryl on his knees beside her, and in his shaking arms…

 _Is it worth it?_

 _It's worth it. It's the best thing that ever happened to me._

She wonders how Lori would answer that question now.

* * *

She doesn't watch the rest of it, but she listens. The voices of the paramedics, calm but run through with deep urgency. Rick's low moan, something like _don't take her_ , and she doesn't want to think about what that means, about who he might be referring to, and she can't stop herself. One of the sirens receding; the ambulance leaving. More voices; she guesses the police. Rick is police. How will they handle this, because of that? They'll ask him fewer pointed questions, probably. They'll be more likely to implicitly believe whatever explanation he offers.

If he's able to think of anything. If he's able to speak at all in a way that makes sense to anyone else. She couldn't, she unwillingly remembers. Not coherently. When she wasn't fighting the paramedics and the nurses tooth and nail, she was trying to make them understand what happened, and it must have sounded like raving, hallucinatory, shit about monsters.

Rick might rave about monsters, and he wouldn't be wrong.

Judith. Christ. _Judith._

She's never seen a child die. All the death she's been present for, and she's never seen that. And it _is_ worse. Worse than any death she can imagine. It's like watching the fabric of the universe get ripped open, it's so utterly and fundamentally _wrong_.

At least it was quick, she thinks, and she wants to tear her hair out by the roots.

And then, one by one, a number of them leave, two police cruisers staying behind. A couple of the officers vanish into the house. A couple more start moving among the gathered neighbors, pushing them back.

No one is near them. No one is watching. For all intents and purposes, they're alone.

It feels like a very long time before anyone moves. Carol changes first, and as she shrinks into human form, her shoulders are still slumped, still weighted. Obeying an instinct she doesn't care to fight, Beth sags against her, and Carol holds her, rocking her slightly, trembling - and Beth understands that she's probably taking just as much comfort in it as Beth is. Poor comfort, but not nothing.

Daryl exhales. " _I'll take care of the body._ "

" _No._ " Shane shakes his head for emphasis. His glittering eyes are unreadable. " _I'll take it. You go._ "

Daryl hesitates, and the unease in his hesitation fills the air around him like an aura. Beth can guess what's behind it, part of her continuing to observe everything with detached coolness: it's weird. Shane is Rick's second in command, or he seems to be. He and Lori are friends. He should want to be at the hospital more than any of them. Which is where she assumes they're going.

A few more seconds, then Daryl grunts what she guesses is a response in the affirmative, and she hears and feels him changing behind her, her face still pressed into the hollow of Carol's throat.

Touch on her upper arm. "C'mon, Beth."

She pulls back, searches Carol's face. What she sees there is a horrible tranquility, peace pulled over like a shroud. Necessity rather than anything natural. Hurried patchwork to keep the cracks from widening to the point of collapse.

 _We all got jobs to do._

"I'll be fine," Carol says, and strokes a hand over Beth's hair. "Go with him. I'll follow in the car with Shane."

There isn't much else she can do. She lets Daryl lead her back across the grass - trampled and flattened and bloodstained, and she doesn't look down the whole way - toward the driveway and the street where he's left his bike.

And this time the ride is no help to her.

* * *

It's only after she walks into the place and smells that hospital _smell_ \- sharp, aggressive antiseptic and lemon cleaner covering up other and decidedly more unpleasant smells - that Beth realizes she hasn't been in a hospital since she was discharged.

When that hits her, she has to stop a few feet from reception and focus on her breathing again.

It's more than the smell. It's the sounds, the flat echoes, the rattle of equipment, the muffled quack of the PA, the droning buzz of voices as if she's standing in a gigantic hive. It's the hard slick sheen of steel coupled with bland beige and pale green. It's the hard quality of _everything,_ the way every surface is possessed of a kind of placid ruthlessness. Poreless and non-porous. Dead.

Lying in one of those fucking beds, staring blankly at the CNN news crawl on the TV in the corner of the ceiling, restraints around her wrists until they were sure she wouldn't try anything else. Until they were sure she wasn't a _danger to herself._

Like she could be any greater danger to herself than they were.

It comes crashing in on her all at once, the sensory input hammering her from all sides, the memory of the grass and the light and the blood, screaming, sirens and lights, Rick's cries, and dark roses bloom at the edges of her vision and she wavers, her stomach lurching, her hands twitching and curling as she pulls rough, shaking breaths into her lungs. Hands on her shoulders, warm and strong, and her name, blunt with worry. She's being pushed backward and held up at the same time and she yields, allows her body to be guided, and when she's pressed downward she sinks and a thinly padded seat gives under her weight. She slumps at the waist and those steadying hands leave her shoulders and close tight around her own hands, and she's being told to breathe. Slow.

 _Just breathe, magden_.

Daryl is telling her to breathe. Breathing with her. _With_ her, flowing into her lungs like air. She draws him in and holds him there, leans in and feels him hold her, rests in him. Strength and soft fur. It doesn't matter that he's not in that form; it's there under his human skin, waiting, here with her even if she can't feel it.

She can breathe.

She focuses on him as he releases one of her hands and combs her hair back from her brow, and searches her eyes. "Beth, you- _Fuck,_ Beth." He tugs her hair further back and tilts her head with gentle fingers on her jaw, examining something. She feels a sting and winces, and then remembers.

The pain when they found her in the closet, and the darkness after. They must have hit her. It slipped away, hadn't mattered. If there's blood on her face, it was probably easy to disregard. There was blood all over.

There might be a lot of things they would miss right about now.

"I'm alright," she mumbles, and his mouth tightens still more.

"Should get you checked out anyway."

" _No._ " She snaps the rest of the way back, her mind and her voice both serrated, and he jumps very slightly, looking abashed. Mixed guilt and embarrassment twinge in her belly, but she wouldn't take it back if she could. She meant it. Everything about it.

"No," she repeats, lower. "I don't want them touchin' me."

He nods, though he's clearly not happy about it. "Alright."

Their names, faint from a distance, and she glances up to see Carol coming toward them from the doors, trailed by Shane. Daryl stands, his fingertips lingering on Beth's shoulder, and Carol pulls him into a half hug, cupping the back of his head as he sighs.

Shane stops beside them. Watches. Looks away, his expression difficult to read.

After a few seconds, Carol steps back, looking from Daryl to Beth and back again. "You find them?"

Daryl shakes his head. "We just got here."

Not entirely true, and she's grateful to him.

"Beth… Oh, sweetheart." Carol stops, bends, touches her head much like Daryl did, and Beth can guess what she's seen. "I didn't know it was that bad."

"It's not." She can't keep the weary impatience out of her voice, and she doesn't try. Her stomach is continuing to stagger like a drunk, even though the rest of it is fading and she doesn't think she's actually about to pass out. "I'm fine."

Carol looks doubtful, but appears ready to let it go. She turns her attention back to Daryl. "I'll go to the desk, see what they say."

She goes. Beth watches her, then drops her gaze and stares down at her boots. The toes aren't only scuffed anymore but spattered with blood - no way to be certain whose - and she wonders dully if she'll be able to get them clean. All of her must be a fucking mess. It's a marvel that a nurse hasn't assumed she's here for herself and missed the entrance to the ER, come over and steered her off to be tended to, given everything that's happened-

She stiffens, gropes at her belt as her breath stutters. In the meantime Daryl has taken a seat next to her, and now he grabs her again, trying to make her face him. "Beth?"

"It's gone," she whispers, and as she says it her fingers encounter the empty sheath, confirm that it is in fact empty, and her staggering stomach trips and plummets through the floor.

"What is?"

"My knife." She gazes helplessly at him. Maybe this shouldn't feel like as much of a catastrophe as it does. Or maybe this is precisely how much of a catastrophe it should feel like. "I think they took it."

His jaw works, eyes wide, and she knows he literally can't find anything to say. She's about to try for herself when Carol reappears beside them, looking sober and pale and inclining her head in the direction of the double doors on the far side of the big room.

"They're all in one of the waiting rooms. She wouldn't tell me anything else. Said they'd fill us in."

Daryl pushes to his feet and turns to Beth, reaches down a hand. His expression is asking a question he doesn't need to articulate.

 _Can you walk?_

In answer, she takes his hand and rises, and she imagines her core as stone.

She hates this place. It's a mirror to an equally horrible place inside her, and she's being bombarded with a searing need to lie on the floor and curl into the fetal position until it's all over.

But she's damned if she's going to let it break her down.

* * *

When they get to the waiting room - a small space that isn't really so much a room as an alcove off a hallway with a water cooler, uncomfortable chairs, and old magazines scattered on a couple of tables - Glenn is leaning over his jittering knees with his hands clasped between them. He looks up, ashen-faced- and that's when Beth sees Rick.

Not sitting, and not with Glenn. He's standing by a large window, hugging himself and staring out at the light-speckled city darkness - darkness that's never truly dark. Beth catches his reflection in the glass, or the hint of it that's visible: a ghost of a man cast against the glowing sky.

Carl and Michonne are not in evidence.

Glenn takes a breath. "Carl's getting checked out. Michonne's with him. Lori… She's in surgery."

Carol takes a seat next to him. Moving mechanically, Beth follows Daryl into a couple of chairs opposite. Shane remains standing, leaning against the wall by the water cooler with his arms crossed over his chest and his face still that eerily impassive mask.

All around them, the hive-drone continues. It throbs gently and persistently between Beth's ears.

"What do they say?" Carol angles herself toward Glenn, leaning over her knees in unconscious mimicry. "If they said anything?"

Glenn opens his mouth, closes it, shakes his head and looks down at the floor. "They don't know. They don't…" He swipes a hand down his face. "She got shot in the fucking head. They don't know."

Carol is silent. For a moment, everyone is silent, and the silence is like a brick dropping through the air in slow motion. Then Daryl jerks his chin in Rick's direction.

"How's he doin'?"

"Bad." Glenn delivers the word flatly, like an echo of that brick. "He won't let me near him. He won't let anyone near him. He won't talk to anyone. Hasn't said anything since we got here." His voice drops as he tips his body closer to them. "I don't know what we're gonna do. We've been _attacked,_ and if he can't-"

"Don't." Daryl isn't loud, not quite dangerous, but edged. Pointed. "We'll fuckin' figure it out."

"Yeah." Glenn glances at Carol. "Is Sophia safe?"

"She's still living with my sister. They're a good ways away. But I'll call her, let her know she might want to get them out of town for a while. Take a _vacation._ "

"They already did what they wanted to do."

Shane's voice is quiet, and as one they all turn to him. He looks back at them, and the corner of his mouth is twitching, as if it wants to twist out of that mask he's set it into. "They didn't need to kill him. They didn't need to kill any of us. Not yet, anyway. They took Rick outta commission, hobbled the whole fuckin' cyne without firin' a shot at us."

"Yeah," Beth murmurs. In the shock, she hadn't even considered the _why_ of it, the deeper reason beyond the one Joe gave. But now it's glaringly obvious. Why fight the cyne at full strength if you don't have to? Murder two women and two children, then sit back and crack open a beer and watch it all burn down.

And really, murdering the one child was probably enough. The one child and, possibly, the one of the two women who would hurt Rick the most.

His mate. It comes to her the same way the fact of the hospital did, all at once and with an impact like a punch. His mate is horribly wounded. She might very well die. This bond that she's been told is deeper than human love, so deep it's woven into the wires of the brain. This bond that's changing her in ways she likely isn't even aware of yet. _Souls._

What happens to one if the other dies?

She's not sure she wants to know.

"They haven't," Glenn says fiercely. "We're not that weak. _He's_ not that weak."

Daryl cocks his head, eyes cold. "Oh really, little man? Second ago you was sayin' the exact opposite."

" _Stop it,_ " Carol hisses, sharp as a blade, and they do, looking at her and then at each other, and Beth can practically see their hackles risen, their ears folded back. "This is what we can't do. Okay? This, right here. Shane's right, _this_ is what they want. If we're not that weak, then _act like it._ "

Another few seconds, the tension humming through the air like a vibrating string. Beth doesn't pause to consider; she lays her hand on Daryl's forearm, and that's all it takes. She feels him backing down, pulling into himself, muscles loosening a bit.

Once more, she thinks of it like she has been. _Down, boy._

For now.

Carol gestures at Rick. "Think I should try talking to him?"

Glenn shakes his head again. "I don't think it's gonna help. She's not even dead, and he's already…" He hesitates, fingers weaving and unweaving between each other. "Well. You know what it's like. And you hated the guy."

"Yeah," Carol says softly. "I know."

Glenn releases a heavy breath, drops his head. "So does Michonne. That's just… Shit, that's too damn many of us."

"I didn't lose a child. And like you said, I hated him. He was a hateful man." Carol pauses, then wipes at her eyes in jittery, nearly angry motions. "He's going to need Michonne now. Both of them are."

Daryl closes his eyes, rakes his fingers through his hair. "They're gonna need all of us."

"Se freamiht a se cyne sy se anhiwe freamiht," Glenn whispers, and the flowing words hang in the air.

 _The strength of the cyne is the only strength._

Daryl ducks his head. "Sothes."

 _Amen._

* * *

It's only after she wakes up that she realizes she's been sleeping. She simply opens her eyes into that same unpleasant overhead lighting, the darkness outside the window, her head in Daryl's lap. She blinks, shifts and scrubs at her face; she's curled up in that fetal position she wanted to adopt earlier, arms and legs pulled in so tightly that they're half asleep. They ache as soon as she moves, a sullen pain that seems to roll through her bones, and she groans.

Daryl's hand tightens a little on her upper arm. She turns to gaze up at him, his tired eyes and the strained lines of his face, glances at the others. No one appears to have moved, their own eyes hollow and red-rimmed. Nothing appears to have changed. She dimly remembers going to the bathroom to wash the worst of the blood off her face, but there's no indication of how long she's been out, and disorientation washes over her, almost nauseating.

She's pushing herself awkwardly upright, about to ask, when Carol and Glenn are seized by something in unison, Carol's eyes widening and Glenn getting unsteadily to his feet. Shane looks up.

Even Rick seems to twitch. It's possible that, ever so slightly, he turns his head.

She turns to follow their lines of attention and sees Michonne walking slowly down the hall toward them, appearing every bit as weary as Beth feels. Her gait is as strong as it's always been, but it wavers at the edges, as if her strength is a stubbornly maintained hard shell with something liquid and churning inside.

Beth can already hear it, regardless of the fact that Michonne wouldn't be delivering the news. _She's gone._

And then she'll get to find out what happens when a mate dies. What becomes of the one left alone.

Glenn steps forward as Michonne reaches them. "What's going on? Where's Carl?"

"They're keeping him overnight, he has a concussion. Otherwise he seems mostly okay. Physically." Her mouth tightens and her eyes shift to Rick.

"What about Lori? You hear anything?"

"She's out of surgery."

Not Michonne. A calm female voice from behind them. Michonne turns along with the rest of them, and there's a tall woman in a doctor's coat, her black hair pulled severely back from her light brown face.

She raises her voice, looking past them. "Mr. Grimes?"

Rick is motionless.

Michonne sighs. "You'd better tell us. He's…" She shrugs unhappily, and while the doctor arches a brow, she doesn't seem inclined to argue.

"Like I said, she made it through. She's in a coma, and for now we're going to keep her that way. In terms of where we go from here, it's just too early to say anything for sure."

Glenn swallows. "But she's gonna live?"

"That's one of the things I can't say for sure." She looks at Rick again, the corner of her mouth tightening. "I really should be telling her husband this."

"No," Michonne says, low. "Trust me, you shouldn't. Not right now."

"Can we see her?" Carol asks, and the doctor tilts her head, frowning.

"Look, are you family?"

"We're friends," Glenn says firmly. "We're really, really close friends." He nods at Rick. "He would say we're family."

"Friends," the doctor echoes, and it occurs to Beth that they must look like a fairly strange collection of people, not exactly what someone would picture when they hear the word _friends_. But the doctor gives her head a slight shake, as if to convey _alright, whatever_ , and pushes on. "You can see her in a couple of hours. But some of you might want to consider going home and getting some sleep. It's almost four, and there probably won't be any news for a while."

"Might as well see the goddamn sunrise," Daryl grunts, and there's a flurry of nods.

The doctor rolls a shoulder. "I'll come back and let you know, then. If you're hungry, the cafeteria is open on the first floor." She smiles wanly. "The food is about as good as you'd expect, but it's edible. Usually."

She leaves, as swiftly as she came.

There's a lull in the space she left vacant, a sense of no one knowing quite what to do with a suddenly finite amount of wait time. Finally Glenn pushes past them and starts toward the elevators, looking back. "I'll go get some coffee. Or something."

"Or something," Michonne mutters, and falls into his abandoned chair in a controlled collapse, tipping her head back and closing her eyes, pressing the heels of her palms against them. "No fucking way I could sleep, anyway."

Carol huffs an utterly humorless laugh. It sounds closer to a sob. "No fucking way I can eat."

Shane says nothing.

But Beth is only peripherally aware of any of this. Yet again it's pounding into her, slamming into her chest and skull - this time the image of Lori in a hospital bed, covered in tape and run through with tubes, machines humming and beeping all around her as they keep her alive. Possibly her as she'll be for the rest of whatever life is left to her. Possibly how she'll spend her last moments. Possibly Rick's last memory of her. Possibly _everyone's_ last memory of her.

Or she won't die, but she'll never wake up. She'll just _be_ that way, for months, for years, for _decades_ unless something happens or someone has the decency to let her go. Either way, this might be how her story ends.

It was horrible, it was the second most horrible thing she's ever seen in her life, but it's better to remember her fighting. To think she died that way.

 _Herself._ Herself in that bed. Herself, a bullet to the brain, tape and tubes and machines. Herself, at last. Dead child. Daryl dying in every other way. Everything dying, everything dead, life and love burning in death's inferno. The universe crumbling like a collapsing tower. Falling like the withered petals of a rose.

"I can't," she breathes thickly, and Daryl touches her back.

"Huh?"

"I _can't._ " _Coward,_ she thinks, _you_ coward, _how can you,_ but she's turning, groping for Daryl's hand, the front of his shirt, pressing close as tears sting her eyes. "I can't stay here, Daryl, I'm sorry, I can't, I can't stay."

"Whoa. Hey." Hand in its place on her shoulder, his other cupping her face. "What's goin' on?"

"Just get me outta here." She shudders and leans her forehead against his chest, gasping for a few seconds before she pushes up to speak in his ear. There's no word for what she's feeling, just like there was no word for the sounds Rick was making. There are no words in any language for some things, for what happens when the fabric of the universe rips wide open, for when things fall apart.

In those moments, perhaps all you can do is find your way back to the beginning and stand there in the ruins, and try to understand.

"Take me to the farm."


	50. we kissed as though nothing could fall

**Chapter 50: and we kissed as though nothing could fall**

Dawn.

She clings to him and watches it come, leans her head back and pulls her hair loose from its ponytail, and the wind streams it out behind her, pulling so hard her scalp almost stings. Daryl is urging the bike to speeds she doesn't think they've yet reached, speeds that would be utterly suicidal for normal riders on a normal bike as he weaves and turns, but it doesn't scare her anymore. Now that they're moving, she doubts she could be truly scared of anything.

It's nothing whatsoever to do with courage.

She stares up at the sky as it slips from the yellow-orange-black of a skyglow night, to a more complete black as they pass out of the city, to a steadily lightening blue. If there are stars at any point, she doesn't see them. Even the light seems dark somehow, as if the sunlight is failing to permeate the air. As if it's touching the world and bouncing off its fabric.

Or vanishing into it, consumed.

A blur of half naked trees. Fields. More trees. Big housing developments. The headlights of the few other cars on the road this early on a Sunday morning, thinning out until they're the only vehicle in sight. By then they've arrived in the reverse twilight that exists before the sun crests the horizon, pink beginning to bleed into the blue.

Tears are gathering at the corners of her eyes, making them itch. Wind, some. Not wind, some.

She hurts all through. Like she's been beaten.

They pass onto the roads she's known since she knew any roads at all. She's aware of them, even though she isn't looking at them; her gaze is still locked upward, and after a little while she closes her eyes against the thin light and the tears. Daryl's frame is as solid as ever in her arms, her knees pressed against his hips, but she's feeling as thin as the light. Like paper, like worn cloth. There isn't very much inside her, and it wouldn't take very much force to rip her apart.

Her mother, good farm wife in some ways that she now understands approached cliche, teaching Beth how to sew. How to mend and how to extend the life of a garment. Reinforcing a seam, making it a point of strength rather than weakness. When it tears, it won't be at the seam, but it will tear. Clothes always do. And when it doesn't tear at a seam, it has to be patched. It can't be hidden. Sooner or later you have something that's more patches than not. By that point, nothing is holding it together anymore. It doesn't matter how strong you've made the seams.

It falls to pieces.

* * *

She opens her eyes as he slows, as she smells the dust the bike is kicking up - _her_ dust, dust of tens of thousands of warm afternoons, working its way into her nose until she sneezed. She doesn't sneeze now; she inhales deep and blinks as she looks around, as he pulls to a stop in front of the blackened foundations of the house.

He doesn't move. Doesn't turn. His breath is coming heavy though not quite as deep as hers, his head drooping forward between his shoulders and his hair hanging in his face as he leans on the handlebars.

When he last took her away from here, she really believed it was the final time.

A soft creak from behind and to her right, and she glances over her shoulder. The slowly spinning windmill, gearbox rusty, a couple of gaps in its wheel. Maybe it was a storm. No one left to repair it.

No one left.

Her legs are emerging from numbness and beginning to tingle as she climbs unsteadily off the bike and takes a few steps forward, her boots scuffing in that achingly familiar dust. The sun isn't yet visible, but it will be any moment, the branches of the ancient collection of trees in the yard reaching up toward the sky like ungraceful lines of black frost. She stands with her fists at her sides and works her tongue in her mouth, and she can feel his silent gaze on her. He brought her out here without argument, without complaint. She wonders if he wanted to be away from the hospital as badly as she did, and if he was grateful to her for providing him with an excuse that wouldn't make him look callous. If he felt the same as she did, about Lori. About seeing Lori like that.

If he felt the same because he can feel what she feels. If she can shape him in that way. Mold him to herself.

She shouldn't. She shouldn't be able to do any of this. She's trapped him, and she's just as trapped. It's not fair.

 _No one ever said life was fair, honey,_ her mother whispers, as if from the ruins of the house, and she wants to cry. But she's so tired.

Without a look back, she starts walking.

Past the old trees, past the blackened foundations. As she does, the world seems to waver, to shimmer like heat, and she catches a dizzying second's glimpse of other houses, identical only not: other fires, other shambling monsters, running, the screaming of horses, and _him,_ always him, present then or later but always with her in the end.

And maybe once where the house didn't burn, where no one died, where everything was good and everyone was happy - one world bathed in light, sunlight and moonlight, and a figure climbing up a trestle. A figure standing in the rain.

A world that never moved on.

She staggers a little, scrubs at her eyes and forces herself to keep moving through the blur.

She knows he's following her as she leaves the house behind and moves into the wide, grassy field where she used to ride the horses, running along the border of the woods and out into the open. Still no sun; has it paused? Is it waiting for something? She's lost hold of time. It's going far too fast and not going at all. She digs her nails into her palms and drags in a breath and walks until she's standing almost exactly in the field's center, everything grass and distant trees, the road and the remains of the house and the flat bare ground where the barn and stable stood no longer visible. She might be alone in the whole world.

Except for him.

She turns to him. He's standing a few yards from her - giving her space. He looks uncertain, scanning her up and down, his face very pale through his dark hair.

He's waiting for her to tell him what to do.

"I couldn't stop it," she says softly.

He inhales, sharp. Nearly a gasp. "Beth-"

"I tried to find the magic. I couldn't. There wasn't anythin'. If there was…" She shrugs, and a trembling laugh escapes her. "But I couldn't stop it here, either. Before. I had the magic and I still couldn't save _anyone,_ Daryl." Her jaw tightens and she looks away from him - from his eyes, their wide and glittering mortification. "Pythia was talkin' like I was some kinda fuckin' superhero, but both times I needed to come through, I didn't. So what the hell? What the hell is any of this _good for?_ "

"Beth," he whispers, shaking his head. "Beth, stop."

"Are you sayin' it isn't true? Are you sayin' I did somethin' I don't remember? Except Judith is still dead, isn't she? Lori's still in a goddamn _coma,_ isn't she?" Her voice is rising. "If I can't protect anybody, it's worth _nothin'._ "

 _I'm worth nothing._

" _This ain't on you._ " In what seems like a couple of steps he's close, gripping her upper arms like he might be about to shake her, his features twisting with pained desperation. "You get that? It's on them. It's on the cyne, for leavin'. It's on _me,_ 'cause I went in there when you said not to. Not a bit of it's on you. You hear? Not one fuckin' _bit._ "

And God, she loves him for that. Even if he's wrong. She loves him so much.

"I said I wanted you," she murmurs. The breeze cools the tears on her cheeks. "I said I wanted that."

"You don't no more?"

"That's the thing." She laughs again, ducking her head. "I do. I can't stop. Isn't that what you told Rick? You told _me._ It was dangerous before, but you can't stop."

Judith's body falling. Lori's head snapping back, light catching the spray of blood. Rick's ghost-face reflected in the window.

 _It's worth it._

"Do you wish you could?" Almost inaudible. Quavering. He's scared, she realizes. He's terrified. He knows what this means as much as she does. Better. He has from the beginning. He was scared then. She thought he didn't need to be, thought he was wrong, and _she_ was wrong, because he was completely right to be scared.

"Do you?"

"No." He doesn't hesitate. He speaks practically before she's done, raises his hands and frames her face, lifting it to his. "Told you that too, magden. Not anymore."

He's so sure. He used to be so _un_ sure.

She manages a watery smile. "I don't want you to get hurt."

"I'm gonna." He glides a thumb through the track of her tears. "I don't want _you_ to get hurt."

"I am."

She's quiet for a moment. So is he. Somewhere, birds are starting to trill. It's bright enough now for shadows. And she understands then that nothing has truly changed. It's not more of a risk now. It was always like this. She just gets it. That's the only difference. She understands the full extent of the risk. She understands that it's not even really a _risk._ At this point, it's a virtual certainty.

It's only a matter of time.

"We're gonna die," she breathes.

"Beth, don't-"

"We're gonna die bloody. Best we can hope is we go down fightin'." She tips his brow against hers and closes her eyes, and draws in his warmth. She feels it kindle inside her, bright and hot, and she knows.

She doesn't want to stop.

"I'm sick of death." She ghosts her lips against his, barely contact at all, but a violent shudder ripples through him, echo of the first time she kissed him. The first time he was kissed by anyone. "Mate with me."

He goes absolutely still.

She pulls back slightly, combing his hair away from his face, and when his eyes lock onto hers she can't move either. She's seen him like this before, in the candlelight in his den. Those eyes are utterly inhuman. Burning. Ravenous. Part of him wants to hesitate, and part of him wants to eat her alive.

"I'm not tellin' you. I'm askin'. Daryl… Please." She sighs and leans closer, and as heat floods between her legs she feels him hard against her lower belly, straining, and her sigh slips into a moan, and it's all she can do to keep from sliding a hand between them and cupping a hand over him.

Then it hits her that there's no reason to stop herself. No reason at all.

His hips twitch forward as she strokes her palm up his length and he hisses through bared teeth. They gleam, those long incisors, and she can already feel them scraping down her throat. And she's already doing that to him, pushing up on her toes and pressing her open mouth to the side of his neck, and he tilts his head back, muscles shifting under her lips as he swallows.

Under her teeth as she bites him and holds on.

 _Mate with me._ She squeezes her thighs together; she's so fucking _wet,_ her body preparing itself for him like it always has, and finally she's _ready._ It doesn't matter that she's not speaking aloud. He can hear her - in what he feels if nothing else. _Mate with me. Please. Right here. Right now._

He jerks himself free and stares down at her, and that's when she feels his hand closing over the back of her neck, and it's not gentle. He's gripping her so tight it's almost painful, and her breath flutters in her chest.

This is not going to be like the other times.

"Now," he murmurs - not entirely a question.

She exhales, her lips quivering. Everything quivering. Something is rising in her, hot and bright in a way her arousal isn't. It's coming from somewhere _deep,_ a place she senses she's only ventured into briefly, and it's taking her. She can't think about this. She can't question. She has to put all that away and _feel._ The only thing that has any place here is pure instinct.

She can't be human.

"Now."

For another few seconds, she's motionless. Then she whirls and starts to run.

She hasn't picked a direction. The direction doesn't matter. This isn't about getting away from him. Her boots pound the earth under her, her arms pumping and her lungs swelling like bellows, and a flock of starlings explodes crying out of the grass in front of her. She sprints through them, the field spreading out on either side of her, some distance in front of her the treeline she doesn't intend to reach. It's whispering in her in a voice she's never heard before - how this has to go, like a ritual she already knew but has since forgotten. It has to be in the open, under the sky, unhidden. They don't have to protect themselves from predators. _They're_ the predators, the apex predators, strong and wild, and nothing matters but this.

She's laughing as she runs, even though an absolute bitch of a cramp is knotting her side, and she doesn't need to glance back to know that he's right behind her and gaining - he's _coming_ for her, because he's scented her heat and he knows she's ready, and weeks ago he claimed her for his own.

She never intended to reach the treeline, but she's almost there when he takes her down.

It's hard. He slams into her with a snarl - still in his human form but nothing human about him - and hooks a powerful arm around her waist and drags her to the ground. The impact knocks the wind out of her but he turns them so he's mostly beneath her, cushioning her, and for a second she's on top before he rolls her roughly under him and straddles her. Human form or no human form, he looks huge against the backdrop of the morning light, towering, and the denim between her legs _has_ to be soaked dark as she gazes up at him.

She needs to feel him. She needs to feel his strength, how much he wants her, why her body chose him, and she squirms suddenly, frantically, and almost works her way free before he pins her by the wrists. Once more she's motionless, panting - panting into him when he kisses her so hard their teeth collide, and then she's biting his lips, his jaw, and he's biting _her,_ sharp little nips that jab whimpers out of her. The prickle of his incisors, warm breath, his tongue rough and broad as he laps eagerly at her throat. She cants her hips up, her jacket half off one shoulder and her shirt gathered above her belly, and he greets her with a slow roll of his entire body, the bulge of his cock grinding against her mound through her jeans.

Too many clothes. Too many fucking _clothes._ She moans low against his open mouth, and this time she doesn't struggle when he releases her wrists and shrugs off his own jacket, tosses it aside, takes hold of hers and jerks it off her so fast and so hard she hears it tear.

He could rip it off her. He could rip it _all_ off her. Strip her bare and devour her, teeth and claws, and she drags her shirt off over her head as he does the same with his, the sun finally breaking fiery red-gold through the trees and gilding the curves of his muscles.

She freezes and stares up at him again, propped on her elbows and her teeth worrying her swollen bottom lip as a shiver rolls from the crown of her head all the way down to her cunt. His skin is ultimately only a mask and it's a battered one, worn and scarred; if she didn't know about it, she would never think of the softness it conceals. That form is so beautiful, she thought that word the second she saw him that way, but he's beautiful like this too. Because she's looking at his _life,_ marked into his flesh. It's not lovely, what that life has been.

But he is.

He meets her gaze for half a moment before he shifts his own away, hair curtaining his eyes. All at once the animal hunger has run out of him like water and she sees the ghost of the man who didn't know how to touch her, who needed her to guide his fingers into what she wanted. He's not scared of her, or of this, but he _is_ scared, and she pushes herself up and strokes a hand from his stomach to his chest, his muscles jumping under her touch.

"Daryl," she whispers, and he releases a breath that stutters and goes ragged when she drops her hand between his legs and kneads him in slow, even squeezes.

He lifts his eyes back to hers and something snaps into focus behind them, and he covers her hand with his. He's trembling.

But only a little.

He told her it would be a while before she could speak the words of the Reord, that she would understand them for some time before that. And maybe that's true, but this is a world like the one at the Frithus, the one in which Eostre's shrine sits, carved off from the rest and self-contained. Safe. Theirs.

Many rules might be suspended.

The words come to her and she says them, and it's the easiest thing. It flows out of her like her breath. _Geane mid me. Mate with me, my love. Geane, min heorte, min beorht eoten, my beautiful monster. Mate with me now._

"Lufiend," he says softly, and he falls on her like a wolf on a deer.

It hurts when he rips her bra off, breaking the snaps in a single fierce yank, and she drops back into the grass with her back and ribs stinging, friction-burned. But it's what she wanted and all she wants is _more;_ he growls and bites at her nipples as he shoves her jeans down her hips, the button popping loose and the zipper grating. She wriggles them free along with her panties, fumbles off her boots and kicks it all away, and stretches out naked under him, her legs falling wide and the air cooling the wet of her pussy and the insides of her thighs. She's just as rough, pulling at his waistband, and he's just as clumsy as he gets the rest of it off and crouches over her on his hands and knees, no longer pinning her with anything except himself. She raises her head and looks; his cock is hanging thick and heavy between his legs, foreskin stretched tight around the head, and as she watches, speechless and suddenly dry-mouthed, a shining drop of precome gathers at the tip and drips in a long clear strand to her belly.

They could do this slowly. But there's no more time for slow. Whatever else they've done, this is still _her first_ _time,_ and she remembers what she thought it might be like, candlelight and satin sheets to cap off a perfectly pretty wedding, and instead a monster is going to fuck her in a field drenched with rising sunlight, while grief and fear is still a cruel fist around her heart.

They're going to die bloody. So _fuck_ slow.

She reaches down and closes a hand around him, feeling him twitch and flex as she squeezes him, and he rocks into her fist with a harsh groan, his head sinking below his shoulders until his brow nearly lies against hers. She tilts her head back and strokes him, licks at his lips, at his tongue when he parts them.

A bird she can't name screams somewhere in the trees; it might be urging her on. She tugs his cock downward and streaks more precome across her skin. Fresh laughter bubbles up inside her, sheer delight: he's wet, wet as her, wet _for_ her, angling his hips to nudge the head of his cock insistently against her mound.

He hasn't changed. But she's not bothered by it. Every cell in her is chanting that this is right. This is happening the way it's supposed to. She already knows what to do. She has since she first pushed up onto her knees and fucked herself to the image of him waiting in the shadows behind her.

Her body knew then, better than she ever did.

He doesn't try to hold her down when she turns over and crawls out from between his arms. She feels him watching her, bestial eyes searing into her, as she bends on her elbows and settles her cheek against the cool grass, blades tickling her nipples, spreads her quivering legs and lifts her ass high.

She's so open. She's nothing but a brilliant burning _openness,_ and it's pulsing through her like her heat: a dense relaxation in her muscles, another rush of wet trickling down her thighs. Him, grasping her - nails digging into her hips and the snuffle as he noses at her, nuzzles her pussy, a stab of lightning and a helpless whimper when he flicks his tongue across her lips and throbbing clit. She _wants_ him, she's been waiting just as long as he has, and she whines, pushing backward. Hissing a word through her teeth.

 _Besece._

 _Please._

He withdraws, and she's about to beg him again when he hauls her back and plunges deep into her.

She cries out. She can't help it. It's not that it hurts - he's not even moving, clasping her by the hips and gasping huge breaths, and she's loose. She can take him with ease. It's that something in her head bursts open as he enters her and floods into her heaving chest, almost more than she can stand. She nearly crumples. It's like falling, her heart leaping into her throat, falling off that cliff and into the blinding core of the Dwolma.

But it's not quite enough.

He's shaking, holding onto her as though she's all that's holding him up. Maybe she is. "Magden." Strangled moan. He sounds broken. Close to frightened. "Ah, _fuck,_ Beth, I'm- _Beth._ "

And he starts to change.

It's indescribable. Another cry rips out of her and she clenches her eyes shut, clawing at the grass, packing soil under her nails. He's changing _inside her,_ shattering and reforming above her and swelling against the walls of her cunt. Soft fur on her ass and thighs and claws scratching her sides, groans shifting into growls, his teeth grazing the ridge of her shoulder. It's happening slowly, slower than it ever has, and the part of her that can still think understands why: it's so he won't hurt her, so he won't split her open the first time, so her body has a chance to learn him.

But he's so _big_. She sobs as he fills her and _fills_ her and doesn't stop. She's so _small_ and he's enormous over her, powerful beyond anything she's ever felt. And the truth is that a healthy portion of her sobbing is relief, plain and simple, because finally she has this - what she's been needing so bad it's literally been driving her insane.

He has it too.

For a moment he's motionless. Silent. Then he starts to move.

She has no idea how she's taking it, but she is. Long slide out of her and a squelching thrust that forces tears out of her eyes, but it even now it doesn't hurt. It's all pleasure, _relentless_ pleasure, washing through every inch of her as he fucks her. She's sobbing and he's snarling, both melting into a sound completely different from either. Melting flawlessly, sweetly, as if they were meant to.

 _Mingling._

She is. They are. She can't move at all under his assault, except for how his thrusts are shoving her forward over and over, yet she _is_ moving, moving in a way she doesn't comprehend, in perfect sync with him. Keeping perfect time. It couldn't be anything but perfect, because she's _in him_ just as deep as he's in her, his pleasure just as much hers. She can feel herself, her slick tightness, the way she fits him, the way she's cracking him open with every roll of his hips. The way he feels _her,_ herself through the lens of him, crashing waves of roaring heat and so deliciously full as he pounds mercilessly into her.

Her sobs are rising into more choked cries and she throws her head back, her eyes wide and staring into the sky. It's like it's coming down on her, the world no longer enough to hold it in place. Or she's tumbling up into it, Daryl around and inside her. They're carrying each other. Everything is in ruins and everything is perfect, so beautiful, so precious. If this _kills_ her now, she'll die happy.

 _It's worth it._

Faster. The sky, the sun whirling across it, his cock fucking her mindless, her juices dripping into the grass like raindrops. The light is screaming and she's screaming into the light and writhing in his claws, flash of red blood on her skin, and then the red is pumping through her and blooming like a thousand roses, his final violent thrust and then his roaring howl as he pours his seed into her, his _teeth,_ her _neck-_

 _Onlucan._

* * *

Open.

Sun through trees, light through veins, wind in her hair. Soft fur under her hands and damp grass under her feet. She's running. He's with her. He always will be, by her side.

Long as he's breathing.

 _Ic beon eower._

She says it with him.

 _I belong to you._

* * *

They're both shuddering when he lowers her down, paw strong and supporting her. He slides out of her and she moans; it aches, burns a little, but mostly all at once she feels so _empty,_ so stunningly incomplete, limp and trembling.

She'll always want him inside her now. She knows this.

She lies there gasping, fresh tears drying on her cheeks, sensing his bulk looming over her. His breath is warm and moist on her spine as he bends to lick her, sweeping his tongue slowly and gently over the nape of her neck, soothing the sting. The skin between her thighs is slippery with his come, and she smiles.

It didn't kill them. It didn't drive them mad.

They made it.

"Afena," he whispers. His voice is all quiet wonder. Awe. He strokes the smooth upper curve of a claw over her cheek, and a sigh escapes her. " _Afena._ "

"Afena." She echoes it even quieter than his whisper. Yes. Afena, at last. "I love you."

 _I'll love you for the rest of my life._


	51. though nothing will drive them away

**Chapter 51: though nothing will drive them away**

Later she'll wonder if she should feel guilty. If she should have felt guilty then. If it was wrong to be that happy, enclosed in that bubble of a universe they made together, when what was outside it was so terrible. If it was wrong to be so happy that, when he finished licking her clean and wrapped her up in his arms, she pressed her face into his fur and wept again. Joy, relief - _release._ She had no idea how tightly she had been wound. Not just since she started wanting him; it began long before that. For a year now she's been like a length of wire bound around one of the fence posts that lines the fields, stiff, crusted with season after season of rust.

She'll wonder if it was wrong and if she should feel guilty, and she won't know the answer. All she'll know is that for those few hours, she was as happy as she'd ever been in her life.

She was as happy as she ever would be.

* * *

The sun is so _warm._

It's getting on to late fall. For the last couple of weeks, there's been a bite in the air. And she's naked, nothing beneath her but crushed grass and what feels like some of her scattered clothing, and the trees are whispering as a breeze stirs their remaining leaves. Her skin should be pebbled with goosebumps. She should be shivering.

She's not. She's warm, the light brilliant red through her closed lids - and in fact she's nearly warm enough to be uncomfortable, sweat in the hollows of her neck and under her arms and in the creases of her thighs. Her thighs, which ache gently, a deep strain in her muscles and hamstrings as if she's overextended a stretch in every direction.

All of her aches. All of her is suffused with that faint throb, and it's most intense between her legs. Sensory input is flowing into her awareness with increasing intensity, and her entire vulva feels almost _bruised._ It flares when she shifts, somehow not at all unpleasant, and as she rolls closer to the softness pressed against her, the last piece slides into place and she smiles.

It's not the sun that's warm. It's him. He's a goddamn blast furnace wearing a coat of fur.

She nestles into him with a low, satisfied hum, and he rumbles in response and curls his big paw over her hip and waist, the tips of his claws prickling her back. Her neck, too. He must have bit harder than he had before. It hurts where it slopes into the ridge of her shoulder, and as with her pussy, the pain isn't _pain_ in the strictest sense. She basks in it like sunlight, a kind of well-used feeling, and hums again, running her hands through the fur on his chest, stroking over the muscle beneath.

She's been asleep. Or close to it. How long? She opens one lid a crack; through a forest of dark fur she catches a glimpse of the sun about a third of the way to zenith. Still early, but less early than it was.

Those claws scratching delightfully up her spine, combing through her hair. A murmur that she hears through his skin as much as from his mouth.

"Ansunde? _You alright?_ "

"Ansunde," she echoes, pulling her head back and craning her neck to look up at him. She's too close like this to get a good view, and instead she catches flashes of his nose, muzzle, the white of his teeth, glimmer of clear blue eyes. It hits her then, how naturally the word came to her, and while she could brush it off as mere mimicry…

She knows it wasn't merely that. It wasn't _merely_ anything.

She presses her fingertips to her lips, and he must be able to detect which way her thoughts are running, because his lips curl slightly in his own startlingly human smile.

" _It'll probably be easier for you now. Understanding. Using it._ " Another light scratch of his claws, this time across her scalp, and she shivers as pleasure trickles down her spine. His tongue flicks against her cheek. " _There's some of me in you._ "

She knows he doesn't only mean the obvious.

"There's some of me in you, too," she says quietly, still stroking him. "Isn't there?"

He nods.

"I didn't know." She breathes a laugh and tips her brow against the base of his throat, the steady bass drum of his heart under her palms. "I didn't know it would be like that."

She did. But she didn't. There's no way she could have. There's no way, she thinks, that anyone could possibly be ready for something like that, no matter how much they know going in. How when people say they were _with_ someone, what they mean is thin and paltry in comparison. She's never fucked anyone except him, but she can draw some conclusions, make some educated guesses. There's fucking someone, and then there's being _inside_ them, complete, whole. Filled with them to overflowing. Even now it feels like she's not close enough to him. It feels like his body itself is in the way.

Once again she thinks about all those skin mags she's used to pass flat working hours - _Penthouse_ and _Hustler_ and _Barely Legal_ and the visual content therein - and her laugh is more than a breath. She knew at the time that what she was looking at was bullshit. She was perfectly aware. And it's not even as if what she just did was some kind of pure, holy _sacrament._ She stuck her ass in the air, practically shoved her dripping pussy in his face, and he fucked her until she was literally screaming and clawing at the dirt. His come was running thick and hot down the insides of her thighs. It was _filthy._

Yet it also was a sacrament. It was. It's just that _holy_ might not mean what she thought.

 _I'm married now_ , she thinks, and turns onto her back, blinking up at the cloudless sky. Suddenly she wants to cry again. There was no license to sign, no minister or witnesses. She didn't have a white dress. They didn't exchange rings. There was no cake, no rice, no bouquet to toss.

Her family wasn't there.

But she's married all the same.

 _We mate for life._

He nuzzles her, pushing up on his side and leaning half over her. An enormous dark shape between her and the sun, covering her partially in shadow, and as it has many times by now, it strikes her how safe he makes her feel with things that would otherwise be somewhat alarming, emphasizing how dangerous he truly is and how easily he could be lethal. His size, his teeth, his claws, and all of them so close to her. He looms over her like this and instead of threatened, she's protected. He's placing his body between her and a world that would - and likely will - do her harm.

" _What?_ "

She reaches up and runs her hand down the length of his muzzle. She's not going to be able to put this properly into words, but she knows he'll get it anyway. "Everything's just changin' so fast."

He grunts, gives her another flick of his tongue. A kiss. " _We'll be all right._ "

"No. We won't." She sighs and closes her eyes. "We're gonna have to go back." Back to all that pain, that suffering, back to a family that's on the verge of being torn apart by an enemy none of them understands the way they believed they did, with no idea what to do. Where to go from here.

Every moment they stay together in this place is stolen.

He doesn't answer. Instead he slides his paw against her side, fingers partway under her back and his thumb stroking over her belly, and licks at her jaw, her throat, warm and rough. She releases another sigh and tilts her head, arches a little, arches still more when he reaches her breasts and glides lightly over her hardening nipples. Heat ripples through her, the sun and him, pooling in her cunt, and she lowers a hand and shudders as she feels the slickness of her lips, a spill of it when she nudges between them.

Not just her. Him. What he poured into her. And maybe it's weird, probably she should feel embarrassed for fixating on it like this, but once more it's as if an animal rises up inside her and her thoughts run deeper and far more instinctive. Primal. How that deep, bestial part of herself _chose_ him, sensed he was suitable and bound itself to him. His strength and his power, and what he can give her. The fundamental urge that serves as the foundation for every mating that's ever happened in the history of the world.

Sharper curve of his smile. An edge of hunger. " _Again?_ "

She laughs softly and drags her other hand downward, over his ears and the bony ridge of his skull, his neck, his impossibly broad shoulders. If she wanted to grip both his biceps at once, she would have to stretch her arms.

It's beyond her comprehension, how she can feel at once so small and so strong.

"Yeah." She looks up at him with a sudden lazy grin and presses a second finger into her pussy, scissoring them, feeling herself tighten and stretch. She's conscious now in a way she wasn't before that she has _muscles_ there, and they aren't weak ones. "Again."

She half expects him to duck his head and continue working her over with his tongue, but instead he's pushing himself up and back to get a better view of her, leaning on one arm, and like this she has a better view of _him_ , and she sucks in a gasp. She hasn't actually seen him in the true daylight, she realizes all at once. Fully a wolf, yes. But not this form, and she hasn't been able to really _look._ So she does, fucking herself slowly and almost absently as her gaze moves over him at an equally measured pace.

Every time he's been in this form she's thought he was beautiful, and now that word is taking on new depth. The sun is falling all over him, and while his fur has always been a wonderful mix of unkempt and soft, the light is giving it a rich lustre, bringing out reds and browns and even flecks of blond with startling vividness. The power beneath it, his massive frame, the perfect mesh of human and animal that manages to be something more than either - harmonious instead of incongruous. His paw is still resting on her thigh and she glances down at his thick fingers, and his sickle claws as glossy as his fur.

Back up at him. At his cock, rising dark and glistening from the thicker fur between his legs, bobbing the slightest bit with every rise of his breath.

She pushes her fingers deep into herself and moans.

" _What?_ " This iteration of the word sounds a bit uncertain, and she wonders with a dim twinge of exasperation if he'll ever believe it.

"You're beautiful," she murmurs - and for once he doesn't argue. He doesn't look away.

He simply looks at her.

"Beth," he whispers, and touches the very tip of a claw to the back of her moving hand. She doesn't shift her focus from him, and when something flickers behind his eyes she knows what he's thinking. She's thinking it too. That it's a shame he can't replace her fingers with one of his own without risking serious injury.

Not that there aren't plenty of other things he can do to make up for it.

It's not enough. She needs _more._ Knows she can take more, knows she was meant to. She adds a third finger, whimpers and lifts her hips, and he curls his paw around his shaft and squeezes, groaning as precome wells and spills over and drips into his fur. She gets it, what's happening, and it bubbles laughter up in her chest. Without explicitly agreeing to the game, they're teasing each other, the desperation mostly gone and something deliciously smoldering in its place. They're greedy. All those moments they've stolen already, and she wants to rob the goddamn bank.

Her free hand finds her tit and she glides her fingertips along its small outer curve, her breath catching as she skims over her nipple. Her juices squelch in her palm, her clit and the lips of her pussy swollen and aching even sweeter than they were. Sacramental this may be, but there's nothing _pure_ about it.

"How do you want me?"

He rumbles a laugh, ducking his head. Absurdly, he shrugs - shy - and mutters something she can't make out. There's only so much of this she's prepared to put up with, after everything, after what they've just _done,_ and she kicks at him, spreading her legs even wider and tweaking her nipple between her forefinger and thumb.

" _Tell_ me."

For a second or two, nothing. Then, just as she's about to deliver another and more insistent kick, he growls and closes his other paw around her thigh just above the knee, pinning her to the ground and sending a pulse of singing heat through her nerves.

"Bidan, magden."

 _Stay._

She does.

On her hands and knees with him behind her, she could feel his size compared to hers, and when he gripped her hips and leaned over and thrust into her, she felt it _inside_. But now she's looking up and he's braced above her, a monstrous creature with his lips pulled away from his gleaming teeth in mock-aggression, and it drags the breath right out of her lungs. It's taking her back all over again, back to those first heady fantasies, when the storm in her head and her cunt was all animal desire, all need as base as any instinct. The rest of the world vanishes under the roar of her blood with his, and she reaches between her legs and gropes for him, finds him, cradles the huge, slick head of his cock in her palm.

The groan that rumbles in his throat is like an earthquake miles down. He rolls his hips, slow, and his shaft slides through the half circle of her curled hand. " _Shit, girl._ "

She echoes his groan and her fingers slip out of her pussy with a quiet, wet sound and she takes his cock in both hands and tugs him, scooting down a few inches. With a grunt she lifts her legs up and back so she's bent nearly double, the tops of her thighs against the sides of her ribcage. She can spread her legs enough to accommodate his frame, at least like this, but Christ, she's going to be sore tomorrow.

Not that she isn't already.

"Fuck me." She's grimacing more than smiling, rocking herself up to meet him and rubbing his cock along her soaked lips, lightning scattering every time he nudges her clit. "God, Daryl, _fuck me._ " He's no longer holding onto her, kneeling with his paws pressed flat on either side of her head and his bared teeth almost grazing her forehead as he lets her move him how she wants. She tilts her head back and stares up at him, sees that his teeth are bared not in a snarl but a sly grin, and she gets it. What he's doing.

He fucked her the first time. He just about pummeled her, took her. Now he's simply making himself available. He's placed himself here, well within her reach, inviting her to fuck herself _with_ him.

It's not even just that. Before, he changed inside her. It was gradual. This time he won't be doing that, and regardless, this time they're not so frantic.

She gets all the control.

Not a grimace anymore but a full-blown smile as she leans up and licks at his tongue, tightens her hold on his cock and inhales when it twitches in her hands. And she's never considered herself one of those women who gives much of a damn about the size of a man's dick, but even if he's not a man, good sweet _Christ_ he's big.

That's not why it feels so good. It has nothing to do with that whatsoever.

"I love it," she whispers, her lips brushing his chin, and he whines softly. "I love you. I love you so much."

It's easy. She angles her hips upward, spread open, lines the head of his cock up with her entrance, and draws him slowly in.

Bit by bit. He whines louder as he presses into her, pushing along with her pull, and her mouth falls open in a silent moan as she feels him filling her. Once more that bruised ache flares, and once more she can't properly think of it as pain _._ It still doesn't hurt. It's just so _much,_ and she lets out a long breath as she takes more of him, gripping his shaft like a rope she's hauling. His thickness, his weight; she relaxes around him and breathes as he nuzzles her throat, nose cool and tongue so warm.

And something is happening.

It's not like before. Before, that first time, it was as though her skin and his were stripped away together and they mingled, flesh and bone and blood and brain. It was wonderful, it was _heaven,_ and it was violent, the tides between them raising an enormous wave that crashed down on them. What's overtaking her now is as slow as they're moving, a sun climbing past her horizon. Brilliant, blazing even, but gentle.

He's in her. He's with her. But it'll never be the way it was.

That's all right. She's not sure how much of it she could take.

"'s good," she sighs, rolls her head to the side until the grass tickles her cheek, strokes her thumbs down his shaft's underside to the base buried in his fur. He shudders and his lower body dips into another little roll, but otherwise he doesn't move. He simply waits for her. It'll never cease to stun her, the fact that she could ask him to do just about anything to her, and if he was capable, he would. Without hesitation, he would.

Her body is screaming at itself to _move,_ to demand that _he_ move, that he _fuck_ her, but she ignores it, and it isn't difficult to do so. She lies there and strokes the root of his cock and gazes up at him, her beautiful monster, her _mate,_ and as the sun lights up his fur like dark fire, she plunges with him into the sky.

The glow blending with the ache, blending with a sharper spark when her fingertips circle over where his shaft sinks into her pussy. All that wet, that slick smoothness; a cry breaks out of her when she rocks herself forward and back, and the speed is of no consequence. It's swallowing her up regardless, waves of pleasure every centimeter he slides in and out of her. She fucks herself on his cock and he joins her with careful nudges, deeper when she wants him deep and farther out when she wants that too. Because he can tell without her having to say a thing, because he can feel it with her.

Because _she's_ fucking _him._

He's whispering as she moves, lips against her brow, her hair - some words she can make out but most she can't. They might not be words at all. But _afena._ That, yes. She moans it with him, releasing his cock and digging her fingers into his shaking forearms. They're together in perfect time now, a trembling rise and fall, and she loses herself in it, letting it carry her. Like running with him, riding on his bike, riding on his back, and how perfect it is. How it feels as if she's exactly where she should be.

With him.

 _Afena. Gea, afena._ She can't tell anymore which one of them is saying it, if there's even a difference. She's wide open, filled, full, and then she's rubbing her fingers over her clit and with a wail she's overflowing. He's spilling with her, _into_ her, a flood of drenched heat in her belly and all through her as his jaws close tenderly on the side of her neck.

 _Making love,_ she thinks as the bright warmth drowns her. _Making_. Yes. That's exactly it.

That's what this is.

* * *

He stays inside her, withdraws only when he's softening, and once again he licks her clean with exquisite delicacy - her sweat and the come sticky between her thighs. She floats dreamily in a blur of trees and sunlight, where they are and why drifting back to her in increments, and suddenly she's seeing Judith fall like a stringless puppet and she curls onto her side and hugs herself and sobs as he gathers her into his arms. She weeps and he strokes her with the backs of his claws, and it's only when she turns awkwardly to face him and hears his low whimper, reaches up to his face and touches his damp fur, that she realizes he's weeping with her.

She hooks her arms around his neck, her fingers deep in his coat, and they hold each other and cry until the shower passes and they can breathe again.

Joy collapsing into the same grief it rose from. She's not surprised at it. This is life. It's a fucking rollercoaster.

She learned that lesson a long time ago.

* * *

Another period of peaceful blankness. She feels rather than sees the shards of the shattered image all around her: the rough pads of his fingers and the sweet pinpricks of his claws, the contained strength there, how much of her naked skin those paws cover when he puts them on her. Turning her, rearranging her, nosing lightly at her throat. Licking at her belly. Licking between her legs, though it's only fleeting and tickles more than anything else, and she lets out a quivering laugh and pushes at his head.

She's half asleep, head pillowed on her arm, but the small part of her that remains conscious knows that he's very much awake. No longer lying with her but - she sees when her eyes flutter open for a few seconds - crouched over her, resting on what she supposes she should call his haunches even if his legs aren't entirely lupine. She senses his watchfulness. Watching for some generalized Other, but also watching _her,_ gazing down at her in more of that same wonder that she saw in him the first time. Gazing at her like he can scarcely believe it.

Gazing at her with a terrifyingly fierce love in his wolf eyes.

Not terrifying to her. It's everyone else who should be terrified. For love like that, there might be no limit to what someone would do.

And when she dies - _when_ \- it'll be with the knowledge that she's been loved that way.

Another flutter of her eyelids and he's bending low, dipping his head down to hers and nuzzling her cheek. The breeze moves like a caress over his sun-soaked fur and he rumbles softly, and she feels what he wants as if it's her own desire.

Because it is.

This time it's all him and she's practically a doll, loose and easy. Onto her stomach, knees bent and raising her ass as he lifts her by her hips, but there's still almost no tension in her muscles, and she relaxes against the strangely comfortable ground - tenses only a little when he slowly pushes into her. That sensation of _stretching_ remains, and it remains painless, even pleasant, and she sighs as he bottoms out, withdraws with a deep growl and thrusts. He's keeping it slow but it's also _hard_ , shoving heavy groans out of her chest. She's helpless beneath him and it feels so good, surrendering and letting him take whatever he wants from her - taking everything he gives her, everything he has to give.

When he comes it's as slow as he's moving, a wind that rises and shakes the trees and dies away. He whispers her name instead of howling, shuddering over and into her, and she follows him into that gush of warmth, whimpering and sagging in his grip. Limp when finally he lowers her down and slides out of her.

She rolls onto her back and blinks past him up at the sky, her hands curled in the grass, her thighs and pussy throbbing and slick. Three times now he's been inside her, and each time when he's left her there's been that same feeling of loss. She needs him. She needs him like she's never needed anything in her life.

The ghost of Rick's face. It's exactly what she was so afraid of. They both have so much to lose.

Everything.

* * *

She opens her eyes to discover that it's noon, and she's starving, and they're not alone.

That last doesn't make itself evident to her right away. What _is_ evident to her, aside from the sun directly overhead and the sullen gurgle in her stomach, is Daryl crouched low on all fours, ears back and hackles raised, snout wrinkled as he lets out a growl like continuous thunder. In a second she's sitting up, and in two more she's on her feet, hand on his flank, her nakedness barely an afterthought.

 _It's them._

It has to be. She has no knife. Her magic is unreliable at best. Daryl has his own set of weapons, both organic and not, all respectable, but if the whole gang has followed them...

But it's not the whole gang. Or it doesn't seem to be. It's a single figure striding toward them, gait calm and unhurried. The figure is human as far as she can see, holding what looks like a staff in one hand, and as it draws nearer, she sees that it appears to be carrying a pack and wearing a coat with its hood pulled up, obscuring its owner's face.

She doesn't scramble for her scattered clothes. She doesn't care. The day before yesterday she probably would have, but the day before yesterday was another lifetime. If she has to fight, she can fight just as well naked as dressed, and she's not shifting her gaze.

Daryl's growl swells into a snarl.

The figure stops a few yards away and stands, motionless and silent, stance erect. While she still can't see a face, she can feel eyes on her. Evaluating. She doesn't blush, but goosebumps rise on her arms and legs, and she tastes the bitter tang of adrenaline.

The silence stretches out, except for Daryl, his snarl dropped back into that persistent growl.

At last the figure reaches up with its free hand and pushes the hood back. The face it reveals is brown and weathered, the eyes piercingly keen - but not aggressive. Cool, but not unfriendly. As far as she can see, he's completely unfazed by the monster beside her, who's giving every appearance of being seconds from ripping his throat out.

The corner of his mouth curls, and the glitter in those keen eyes is undisguised amusement. "Should I say congratulations?"

Beth arches a brow. "What?"

"You two." The man gestures at them. "A happy mating is worth congratulating. Especially these days." And without missing a beat he leaves English behind, the first thing so far that's wrongfooted her. "Awilne fagennes."

Daryl freezes under her hand.

The man cocks his head, and when he speaks again it's still in the Reord. " _Unless I scented you wrong. If I did, my apologies._ "

Beth swallows, at a total loss, but as she glances at Daryl - hoping for some indication of what her next move should be - he slowly pushes up to stand erect, and despite being twice as tall as he was, he's far less intimidating. His ears are pricked instead of lying flat, his nostrils flaring, and his eyes are bright with interest.

" _You're Hathsta._ "

"Gea." The man nods politely and leans on his staff. "We're not exactly abundant anymore, so maybe you can help me. My name is Morgan. I'm looking for a man called Rick Grimes _._ "


	52. this surface may seem calm enough

Sorry it's been a while. I've been going through a bit of a rough patch where various things are concerned. Basically I'm not sure when I'll be able to pick up the pace, and I'm in one of those deeply unpleasant periods where I feel like nothing I write is up to my own standards. But those have never lasted for very long before, and I have faith that this one won't either.

I'm also going to Poland next week and will be gone for about a week and a half, so while updates during that period aren't out of the question, I wouldn't look for them. But I won't be entirely off the grid, and hopefully I'll at least be able to get some writing done. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 52: this surface may seem calm enough**

It's only after they're on the road, his back solid against her chest and cheek and the wind singing around them, that she realizes: on the way out here, she hadn't been able to imagine the return journey at all. Not that she had been trying to do so, but even in the most abstract, assumptive way, it simply hadn't been there. As if the deepest part of her had been certain that her life would end in that field.

And it did, is the thing. She changed with him. Not as she has before - it's quiet, subtle, like a whisper in the back of her mind. Like a song she can almost remember.

It's early afternoon, the sun still high and brilliant, and she allows her eyes to unfocus and follow the blur of their single shadow on the blacktop. The softer blur of the grass and trees. She's feeling herself in a way she didn't before. Every muscle in her body is sore, that persistent throb between her legs - legitimately pain now. Her head is hurting again; for a while she forgot that it ever had been, but it's taking every opportunity to remind her. She's calm, no longer near a paralysis of horror and despair, but there's no missing the fact that they left their secret world behind in the grass, and even if the sun is bright, they're speeding back into the darkness. She can feel it, like a bone of ice in the wind.

And the warm hours of joy they stole… She can only hope that they won't have to pay too dearly for it.

 _Please._

Somewhere ahead, Morgan is moving through the world, headed for the hospital. Ahead of them, even though they have the bike and he has nothing; while he hadn't been exactly forthcoming about really anything aside from his name, she sensed that he might be capable of more than she's seen, and his seemingly throwaway _I'll meet you there_ had somehow given her the distinct feeling that he'll beat them.

Hathsta he may be. But not like any other Hathsta she's known. Not that she's known many.

Not that there are, apparently, many left to know.

She's still not sure what she thinks. But her gut is telling her that Morgan isn't dangerous, at least not to them, and Daryl appeared to trust him, though there hadn't been time for her to get him to explain why. Now, lulled by speed and with a chance to turn it all over in her mind, it occurs to her that this might be a timely arrival. Might be a thin shard of better fortune in the wreckage of everything.

He's looking for Rick. Maybe he'll be able to help him.

Not the only shard, though. Because Daryl's heartbeat is pounding into her chest, pulling her own into its rhythm, and she knows it's not her imagination. Sighing, body flush with his and her arms tight around his waist, she's sure of it in a way she's never been of anything in her life. She's _with_ him now. They're together. For so long she's felt so alone, but she'll never be alone again. Neither will he, and he's acquainted with _alone_ far more intimately than anyone ever should be.

Not anymore. She smiles against him, and she doesn't doubt that he can feel it when she does. Not through his skin but in the core of him, where everything is remade.

As long as he's breathing, she'll be by his side.

* * *

They're roaring down the Atlanta streets by the time she remembers how goddamn _hungry_ she is.

It pounces on her all at once, sudden as if she inhaled it with her last breath, and the sheer intensity of it makes her almost dizzy. Not to the point where she thinks she might tumble off the bike, because if that was a problem once she strongly suspects that it - magically - isn't anymore, but she gives Daryl's waist a quick squeeze, pushes up and speaks one word in his ear.

 _Food._

He doesn't look back or ask for any kind of clarification, or ask that she wait until they're at the hospital, and she wouldn't have expected him to do any of those things. He simply swings off the street and into the half-full parking lot of a 7-Eleven. And later, thinking back, she'll consider the possibility that he was beginning to turn even before she said to.

She'll wonder just how much of her he can feel, now. How much more than he already could.

He's barely pulled to a full stop before she's hopping off and striding toward the door, groping in her pocket for cash. Her fingers brush over a few crumpled bills as behind her he calls "Get me a hot dog, wouldja?"

She has to smile at that. She's not certain _why_ she's smiling, but it feels good. A little. Maybe it's simply that he sounds so much like _himself._ Even now, after everything that's happened. Different on the cellular level, like her, but also in many ways he remains the man she met in that alley weeks and a lifetime ago, and that's good.

Because it's that man she fell in love with.

She's well aware that she must still look like a wreck - if anything, more than she did only a few hours ago - but they aren't in the nicest part of town, and a human wreck wandering into a 7-Eleven for hot dogs and soda and energy bars probably isn't particularly out of place as far as phenomena go. As she steps through the jingling door into the thick odor of taquitos and questionable meat, she glances around, immediately expecting to see a vampire or gnome or whatever else, but the few people in the aisles and the tired-eyed young man behind the counter all look relatively normal. For a given value of _normal;_ her version of that value has been undergoing some adjustments.

She grabs a couple of bottles of Coke out of the fridge and snags two energy bars on her way to the front, not bothering to identify what kind. And then she's walking out with a plastic bag in one hand and two lukewarm hot dogs held precariously in the other, and it hits her how fucking _simple_ that transaction was. How it's the first honest-to-God uneventful thing she's done in what feels like years.

 _Yeah, well, enjoy it while you can._ Shawn sounds grimly amused. _Might be the last one for a good long while._

She's smiling again as she hands Daryl his dog, slings a leg over the seat behind him and shoves hers into her mouth, hardly bothering to chew. He cranes his head back, the curl of his lips indicating mild confusion.

"What?"

"Nothin'," she manages to say around her chewing. It's doubtful whether she could explain it anyway. "Let's get outta here."

* * *

But when they pass through the hospital doors, she feels about as far from smiling as she ever has.

She had once more succeeded in forgetting about it, she suddenly understands. Not completely, but she had removed it from the forefront of her attention to the point where it no longer tore at her, and now it's roaring back with a vengeance, as if she does indeed need to pay. And it's not only that; what sweeps over her is a less intense version of what did the first time she walked in here, that sensation of the past arcing viciously back on itself to stab at her, memories of condescending doctors and medication that made her feel slow and stupid and constantly weary. Of the dull terror that it was never going to _stop,_ that even if she tried her best to seem normal she wouldn't fool anyone, and sooner or later she would be dragged into a psych ward and never allowed to leave.

Tears flood her eyes and she shivers. But Daryl takes her hand, envelopes it in rough warmth, and she doesn't falter.

Damn it all to hell, she _will_ be strong.

She scrubs the tears away in time to see that they're being awaited. Morgan is rising from one of the seats against the wall, giving them a faint smile. His staff looks incredibly out of place and it's earning him more than a few odd looks, which he either doesn't notice or is content to ignore. He bobs his head in greeting, and Daryl gives him a nod in return. Small though it is, something about the gesture strikes her as more formal than not. Edging toward ritual.

She knows enough to know that she knows hardly anything. The vast majority of Hathsta traditions are still completely unfamiliar to her. She should, she thinks wryly, probably learn more about the family she's married into.

Daryl gives Morgan a quick up-and-down. "Been here long?"

"Not all that long. Half an hour, maybe." He lifts his chin toward the desk and the harried man and woman behind it. "I could've asked them, I guess, but I figured it might be wise to go with you. If nothing's better with Rick's wife…" His mouth draws into a thin line. "Or if it's worse…"

Beth narrows her eyes. "Is Rick gonna have a problem?" _Another one? Because I don't think he can take that._

"With me?" Morgan shakes his head. "I'd say nothing big. But we didn't say the most comfortable kind of goodbye, and it's been a long time since I've seen him. He might've assumed he never would again. And…" He taps his fingers meditatively on his staff. "I have some things to talk to him about."

 _Things._ She almost asks, but thinks better of it. She doesn't imagine that Morgan will be any more forthcoming about those than he has about anything else, and she also isn't sure she even wants to know.

The odds are better than average that she'll find out anyway.

Daryl doesn't bother going to the desk to make his own inquiries. He starts toward the elevators without any further hesitation, and she follows him, feeling Morgan's presence close behind her. No further inquiries were needed. She knows: some contingent of the cyne will be where she and Daryl left them, even if one or two - or more - have gone home to snatch a few fitful hours of rest. Rick will be there. If they're still keeping an eye on Carl, he won't have any reason to go home, and every reason to stay.

Every reason _not_ to go home. And he won't want to. She knows that too, better than she ever expected a year ago. Right now, to the extent that he can feel anything much, he almost certainly wants to never go home again.

Anyway, it's a fucking crime scene.

 _God._

* * *

She was right. More than right; no one has gone home at all. The whole cyne is there, and appears to have barely moved. In a muted pool of sunlight, Carol and Glenn are awkwardly dozing in their seats - looking at them, Beth guesses with grim amusement that they're wishing they could slip into their wolf skins and curl up on the floor - and Michonne is sitting opposite them, elbows braced on her knees and her hands clasped under her chin.

Rick is still gazing out the window. Or he probably is; she can no longer see his face in the glass, his figure oddly featureless silhouetted against the bright sky.

In fact, it's not quite the whole cyne. Shane is nowhere to be seen.

Michonne looks up as they approach, and as her tired eyes focus on the three of them, her gaze hardens and sharpens. Not upset - not more than she already was - but piercing. Since Beth met her, she's never been one to reveal an overabundance of emotion, but it's impossible to miss the succession of feelings that tug at her features. Faint surprise, recognition, realization and something like the ghost of joy when she looks at Daryl - and then pulling cautiously inward as her attention settles on Morgan. She doesn't appear inclined toward outright mistrust, but she's wary.

And the surprise lingers. She knows him, and yes: she was definitely not expecting to see him.

But then she's focusing on Beth and Daryl again, getting to her feet and coming forward with one hand outstretched and a soft smile lifting the corners of her mouth. Relief there, as well, and when she reaches them and lays her hand on Daryl's shoulder, she ducks her head in that same ritualistic nod.

"Brother," she murmurs, leans in and nuzzles his jaw, the corner of his mouth. "Awilne fagennes."

Daryl sighs, smiles, nuzzles her in return, and Beth is aware of Glenn and Carol stirring and pushing themselves up as Michonne turns to her. It's only when Michonne's gaze meets hers that Beth grasps it: this is more than the ghost of joy. This is joy as deep as she's ever seen, but it's cloaked in an equally deep bittersweetness, a sadness that wraps around it like a shroud. In a flash, Beth's imagination assembles the image of how this might go in a better time and a better place - something like how she imagined her family would congratulate her on her eventual engagement. Embraces and happy tears in her mother's eyes, maybe. Her father's. The pride sparkling there. Maggie grinning fit to split her face in half, and Shawn trying to maintain his outward cool and totally failing.

It was supposed to be perfect. Like so many other things.

But Michonne hugs her tight, and there's joy in it.

Glenn and Carol are joining them, their own realization clearly dawning. Their smiles are weary and strained but as real as Michonne's, and Glenn takes Beth's hand and squeezes it while Carol pulls Daryl into her arms, whispering something in the Reord that makes him breathe a laugh. Then her arms are circling around Beth, and that's when Beth's throat begins to winch itself closed and her eyes burn, and she's so fucking _sick_ of crying, but maybe crying over this isn't such a bad thing.

She's lost one family in the worst way, watched another torn apart in front of her, but what Lori said is still true. It's more than Daryl - as if he isn't more than enough.

She has these people. They won't abandon her.

"Forwilcumian." Michonne's voice is stronger as she steps back and stands erect. _"_ Afena ond Agendfra. _Blood of our blood, life of our life. You are most welcome among us._ "

Without meaning to, Beth glances toward the window - where Rick is unmoving, as if nothing is happening at all, or as if he's lost in some other world where none of it reaches him. She's certain: _he's_ supposed to be the one delivering these words. He's the _Eal;_ not merely a general term but a proper noun. His family has changed forever with her addition, and it follows that he would be the one to solidify it. But his family has changed far too much.

It's possible that he has too.

Shane's flat, hard voice: _They didn't need to kill him. They didn't need to kill any of us. They took Rick outta commission, hobbled the whole fuckin' cyne without firin' a shot at us._

She's opening her mouth to ask, but Daryl beats her to it. "Lori?"

Michonne crosses her arms and shakes her head, the light fleeing her eyes. "No change. Which I guess is good, in a way. Or it could be a hell of a lot worse." Beth can sense the next words from Daryl, feel the shape of them on her tongue almost as if they're her own - _where's Shane_ \- but Michonne doesn't give him a chance. She swings her gaze around to Morgan, expression set, and her tension throws the muscles in her arms and throat into sharp relief.

Not her tension alone. All at once the air is thrumming with it.

Morgan returns her gaze placidly, leaning on his staff.

"Didn't think we'd see you again."

"Neither did I, for a while there." Morgan inclines his head in Rick's direction. "Don't think I forgot how hard he tried to convince me."

"Don't think he forgot either," Carol says, cool. "Your timing was bad then and it's bad now. Worse. You have any idea what just happened? What makes you believe he'll want to see you at all?"

Morgan gestures at Beth and Daryl, seeming to ignore the thinly veiled hostility. "These two filled me in, some. That you were attacked. That his child was murdered." His voice drops and trembles ever so slightly, and for the first time since meeting him, Beth spots a crack. It's narrow, barely visible, but it's there. His calm isn't merely a mask, but it _is_ concealing things. "I never even got to meet her."

"If you hadn't left when you did," Glenn says quietly. "If you hadn't-"

Scuffle of a boot behind them, outside the circle they've formed themselves into, and Morgan turns, and Rick is there.

Rick is there, cheeks and jaw dark with heavy stubble, his hair disheveled. His skin is pale, bloodless as a corpse, and it hangs off his bones like lank cloth tossed over a wire frame. He resembled a ghost in the glass; if anything he resembles one even more in the daylight. His eyes are the worst - dark, blank holes in his head that consume the light and allow nothing to escape.

He looks utterly mad.

"Rick." Morgan's voice is soft and carefully level, as if he's speaking to a spooked animal, and he takes a slow step forward. "Rick, brother, I am so, so sor-"

The punch is too fast to see. Beth blinks and then Morgan is crumpling to the scrubbed floor with a sharp grunt, hand pressed to his face and blood already oozing between his fingers. Rick watches him go down, expressionless, and as Glenn falls swiftly into a crouch with a hand on Morgan's shoulder, he turns and walks away. He moves jerkily - _mechanically,_ Beth thinks, like a robot in sore need of a reboot.

No one makes any attempt to follow him.

He's not okay. Whatever Glenn says, whatever _anyone_ says, he'll likely never be okay again.

Morgan is sitting up, gingerly exploring his split lip with bloody fingers. More blood is beginning to drip from his chin, and Carol kneels with a wad of tissues in one hand, blotting at his face.

"Good thing we're in a hospital," she says dryly. "I'll hunt down a nurse."

"No." Morgan's speech is muffled but intelligible. "'m fine. Just need a minute." He takes the tissues from her and winces as he presses more firmly, feeling for his staff with his free hand. Michonne gives it a nudge with the toe of her boot and it rolls against his thumb.

Glenn sighs. "Well. That could've gone better."

Beth probably isn't as surprised as she should be when Morgan laughs. It's little more than a wry chuckle, but given what's just happened, it's oddly good-humored. "Maybe." He lifts the tissues away and gives them all a bloodstained smile. "But it went pretty much like I expected."

"Alright." Daryl - gruff, faintly impatient, arms folded across his chest. "So obviously y'all know what's up, but maybe you could clue in the newbies? The fuck was that about?"

"It's a long story-" Michonne starts, but Carol cuts her off.

"And you need to hear it." Her gaze is focused not on Daryl but on Beth. And what Beth sees there isn't remotely comfortable. Carol doesn't want to talk about this. No one wants to. But no one has wanted most of what's happened in the last forty-eight hours, and the trend shows no sign of reversing.

This might just be how things are now.

"Sit down." Carol nods at the chairs, pushing to her feet and reaching a hand down to Morgan. "This could take a while."


	53. it's this living in between

**Chapter 53: it's this living in between that's bringing me down**

The entire situation has taken on a profoundly surreal atmosphere - and in fact it was surreal enough even before this. But as Morgan sinks into one of the chairs with his staff propped at his side and his head tilted back to slow the flow of blood, and the rest of them awkwardly find their own places, the sense of unreality that overtakes Beth here in the daylight is far more intense than what she found at night.

She doesn't actually remember when she last slept for more than a couple of hours at a stretch.

The buzz of ambient hospital noise swells and subsides around them. Carol takes a seat next to Morgan, body angled toward him, gaze keen. Beth sinks down opposite the two of them, Glenn beside her, Daryl's weight and warmth wrapping around her like his arms as he leans on the chair behind her.

And Michonne, in Rick's place by the window. Her back is to it, her dark eyes locked on all of them rather than out at a blank nothingness, but there's still something about it that ripples unease through Beth's core.

It's not just Rick. None of them are okay. Not really.

Carol, far from launching into a story, appears focused on Morgan, tugging the bloody wad of tissues away from his face for a few seconds of evaluation before returning it to its task. "Doesn't look broken," she says flatly. "Even if it was-"

Morgan cuts her off with a stuffy, distorted response that vaguely resembles _I've had worse._

"What's up with the kid?" Daryl sounds as if he just realized it was a question someone should ask, his tone edged with worry. "He doin' alright?"

Michonne nods. "Alright as he can be, I guess. Physically. He's quiet. He's… not talking much." She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose, and though her stance is balanced and strong as it ever is, the weariness eating away at it is perfectly obvious. "I've been checking on him. Rick won't see him."

"He's still standing," Carol murmurs, looking down at her blood-smeared fingers. "Rick is, I mean. That's a hell of a lot more than most would be able to manage."

"You'd know, right?" Glenn leans forward and rakes his hands through his hair, presses his palms briefly against his eyes. Tired. They're all so fucking _tired_. "You wanna talk about that?"

"Not just me." Carol raises her head and meets Michonne's cool gaze with her own, and Beth is sure she's watching some unspoken exchange pass between the two of them. A question asked and answered, because Carol dips her head in an almost imperceptible nod and drops her eyes again. "But yeah. I'll talk."

For a long, strange moment, silence. The kind of silence that draws the air out of a space, as if the world outside is breathing it in and holding it. Waiting. Beth has been able to sense their emotions before - has assumed that, like dogs, they feel things powerfully and express that power with a species of ambient purity far more than a human would or could. But the potency has increased for her, and now it's nearly overwhelming. It presses on her chest like a hand. Uncomfortable anticipation. Anxiety. Resignation. The weariness that's serving as a backdrop for everything.

Then Carol draws her own slow breath and begins to speak.

"Rick was born into this cyne. His father was Eal before him, and his grandmother before that. It happens that way a lot of the time, though not always. You don't get the position automatically. There are tests you have to pass. The cyne has to accept you. So of course not everyone makes it through that. But anyway, that's how he got the job."

She pauses a moment, looking down at her clasped hands. "Shane was born into the cyne too. And Glenn and Michonne. But only a generation or two back. Used to be, generations after generations would be part of the same cyne, but that was before more people really started moving around. It was also before things started getting bad." She raises her eyes, and they bore into Beth's - pain. Sadness. It's all Beth can do to keep from looking away. "A lot of things aren't what they should be. A lot of things are going very, very wrong."

A deep exhalation from behind Beth and a hand heavy on her shoulder; she jumps, but when the hand starts to withdraw she reaches up and stops him. Pulls him back to her. She _needs_ him there, touching her. That choking air of wrongness would be just about unbearable without him.

And this is about him too. This story. She doesn't know where the certainty is coming from, but it's there.

" _Heala_ means _great love,_ " Carol continues, her voice low. "We believe Eostre made it to be the perfect bond. Unbreakable - but more than that. Two minds and two souls, so deeply joined that they become almost one being. People joined like that, they should never hurt each other. Never betray each other. It's not even about not being allowed to - they shouldn't ever want to. They shouldn't be _capable_ of it."

"Let me guess," Beth murmurs. A dull feeling of dread is stealing over her. None of this will ultimately be a surprise. With what she already knows, she's been able to draw her own rough conclusions. "It's not workin' that way anymore."

Carol shakes her head, mouth tight. "No. It's not. That's how I ended up with this cyne. And that's how everything went wrong." She glances up at Daryl and for a few seconds Beth is sure she's about to say something, but then she looks away, biting at her lower lip.

"I had a son," Michonne says softly. "A mate. I don't have either of them anymore." And she falls silent, her face a stone mask.

"When I was first mated, everything was wonderful. It seemed like it should be. We were both older, him and me, but I got pregnant pretty quickly." A faint, wistful smile tugs at the corners of Carol's mouth. "My cyne was so happy. It was a tiny one, only four people - I lost my parents early - but I was sure they'd be more than enough family. The future… Everything was going slowly to pieces around us, but I still felt like the future was a… a promise.

"After Sophia was born, everything still seemed alright at first. But she was _niehsta_. Kinfolk, human. Everyone was hoping for Hathsta, and when it didn't turn out that way…" A tense breath escapes her, her shoulders hunching. "It wasn't like they were blaming me to my face. But that's basically what it came down to. There were all kinds of tiny ways they made it clear to me, and it just got worse and worse. I wanted to be a _mother,_ I wanted to take care of my baby, and I tried to lose myself in that, but it didn't work. Not forever."

She pauses again, and it's a lengthy pause. No one is looking at her except Beth - and, she can sense, Daryl behind her. If she turned around now she would see that blue wolf gaze, sharp as a fang, piercing everything it touches.

"So," Carol says, quiet. "That's when he started hitting me."

Beth stares at her. The air is cool on the surface of her eyes as they widen. This makes no sense. This makes absolutely no sense. If the positions were reversed, then _maybe_. But Carol in fierd has to be over seven feet tall, all muscle adorned with teeth and claws that could rip a fully grown deer to shreds. What man would be stupid enough to hit her? Not even stupid; _suicidal_.

Her bewilderment must be abundantly clear, because Carol gives her a thin, wry smile and nods. "I know. Sounds ridiculous, right? The thing is, I couldn't hit back. I literally, physically couldn't. I couldn't do anything to stop him - and don't you _dare_ think I didn't try. At first I had no idea what the hell was going on with me. Then I figured it out. And it was horrible."

"Heala," Daryl whispers, and he sounds hollow. Barely there. His hand is trembling on Beth's shoulder, and as that trembling works its way into her body, she clasps him and squeezes, _willing_ everything in herself into a counter-tide. Not merely stopping it but washing it back.

 _Seft, afena. Lufiend. Liths. My love, my sweetheart, be calm._

And he is.

"Heala," Carol echoes. "Something in it went bad. He could hurt me, but I couldn't hurt him. It was all I could do to protect Sophia from what was happening. You have to understand, too - it wasn't even all the time, him being like that. At first he would do it and then be sweet to me, say he was so sorry, he'd never do it again. Until he did. Then after a while he stopped bothering with _I'm sorry._ " She lowers her head and scrubs a shaking hand down her face.

Beside her, Morgan moves without seeming to move at all and lays a hand on her knee.

"He took me away from the cyne. Not fast. I saw them less and less. They came to me less and less. I was so focused on Sophia. Then we moved away from everyone, the cyne and my niehsta, and one morning I woke up and realized I was alone. I was completely alone. Except for Sophia." She swallows. "I was alone, and I was more frightened than I'd ever been in my life.

"This is where people ask _why didn't you leave him?_ Same reason I never hit back. I couldn't. You can't. Life without him was… I couldn't imagine it. I _hated_ him by the end, but part of me really did think that losing him was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. It wasn't even thinking. If it was about thinking, maybe I could've talked myself out of it. It was so much deeper than that."

She raises her eyes, and they're shimmering with enraged, unshed tears. It's terrible to see. Beth can't look away.

"So then I started hating myself. I started hating everyone. Everything. Except Sophia. She was my entire world. She was all I had left."

Yet another silence. Beth studies her face and her minutely twitching features, entranced, until a flutter of movement below Carol's chin captures her attention. Carol is pulling at her own fingers, slow and hard, as if she's trying to crack her knuckles. There's something so familiar about the tic, and after a second or two she gets it: Daryl does the same thing when he's anxious. Not quite identical, because nothing about him and Carol is identical, but Beth looks at this now and the certainty that she's seeing trees with the same root goes all the way down to her marrow.

Same root, afflicted with the same blight.

Dug into the earth with the same strength.

"Then he started…" She grits her teeth - long. Sharp. Fury locked behind them. "He started _putting his hands_ on her. Just grabbing her, smacking her, but I knew he wanted to do more than that. I saw how he was looking at her, when he thought I wasn't watching. First night I stood guard in her room was the night I knew we had to get away.

"I still don't know where I found it in me, whatever let me do it. I didn't plan. I didn't _think_. The next night I waited until he passed out drunk, and I changed and put Sophia on my back and ran. Or I tried to run. It was like running through tar. I must've been going faster than that, but every step was… It was torture. Every single part of me screaming that I couldn't. Eighteen miles out in the woods, I started wondering if it might actually kill me. Then I figured that was still better than going back to him. Except there was Sophia, and she was so goddamn scared, crying, trying to be quiet because I told her to-"

"Stop." Michonne is there all at once, without seeming to have crossed over any distance whatsoever. A breath and she's standing behind Carol, laying her powerful hands over the slumped ridges of her shoulders. Not squeezing. Merely present. "You did what you had to do. Alright? You get that."

"You were brave," Glenn adds, his eyes shadowed and serious as he leans forward. "You were braver than… I don't even know. You gotta believe it. You were _legendary_."

"Even with what happened after?" Carol looks around at all of them, tears shimmering in the hollows beneath her eyes and threatening to stream down her cheeks. "Even then?"

Michonne frowns. "That wasn't your fault. We've been over this."

"Yeah. We have. Over and over and over." Carol presses her fingertips to her brow and shudders. "And now we're going over it again, only new. I'm starting to wonder how many more times we will."

Carol's eyes are covered, but in a flush of certainty, Beth knows Carol is directing those final words at her. At _them,_ at the man standing so close. And it's not about the idea that he might hurt her, or she might hurt him. Not like that. It's about Lori's blood exploding into the light around her head like a ruby halo, and Judith's little corpse tumbling to the ground, and Rick staring at his own ghost in the dark. It's about how, outside that bright piece of the world that she and Daryl stole for those few brilliant hours, everything continued to fall apart, and about how there might be no way to make it stop. About how everything has gone wrong, and Carol's story is only a part of it.

About how other parts are all around her.

She gradually becomes aware that she's stiffening, her muscles going rigid beneath skin that feels stretched tight across the frame of her bones. Carol is speaking again, but when the words come to her, they aren't words any longer. They're sharp flickers, lightning-strikes of a dream, and she sees what happened as if Carol is stabbing the memories directly into her mind.

She sees a huge silver wolf with a child clinging to her back, a shade of the moon sliding silently through the night. She sees the fear, the agony, the ferocious determination that forces the two of them onward - and are the angry shouts in the distance real? Are they imagined? It doesn't matter; running now. Crashing over snapping branches and whispering leaves, down a steep gully and splashing through a cold stream and up the other side. Galloping alongside a road, the roar of semis on long hauls, waves of headlights. Disorientation. But they've gone a long way, longer than she grasped, until she stumbles to a halt and crouches, panting, her lolling tongue and jaws dripping, precious little life trembling against her shoulders, and it comes to her that the worst of the pain is gone.

Not the entirety. She's being dragged back, and the pull is impossible to ignore. But she can bear it. Every additional step she takes from this moment onward will be easier.

So she takes them. She takes them all the way to the city. There she meets a man with steel blue eyes and a gun and a steady hand, and he isn't alone. Few, to be sure, but they take her in, show her kindness, assign her a place and a task, give her and her child a _frithus_ in which to rest and - step by step - begin to heal. And there, in that sanctuary, her fear and pain harden into rage.

Until he comes for her.

Of course he does. He was always going to. Whatever escape she seized was only ever temporary. She hates him with every fiber of her being, but even so, every one of those hateful fibers is calling him, howling a beacon for him to follow. It's not a surprise to her, no more to any of the others; they expected him eventually. What they didn't expect was the manner of his coming, and they should have, because the pain she suffered in the act of separation wasn't confined to her. Later she would curse herself for not having realized - for not remembering something she already knew. She left him, and he got sick.

She left him _alone,_ and he went mad.

Threads of Bealu were known to her, strands woven into the fabric of the universe - not much power but enough, and she had taught him some of it, because how can you _not,_ when every part of you is bound to every part of someone else? What she didn't explicitly teach him, he would likely have gleaned on his own. Regardless, he knew things he shouldn't have known. As she discovered.

As they all did.

He came not long after noon, and he wasn't alone anymore.

A blinding crack that splits the world open, and this is what it reveals: sun, warm grass and the breeze running playful fingertips through the leaves. An idle family day in a state park, grilling food and sprawling on blankets, two children chasing each other zig-zag between the trees. So much fighting, so much blood, but today they push all that aside and seize the light. Meaningless conversation. Smiles. A man and two huge glossy wolves, wrestling - laughing - on the ground. Easy to believe that everything is all right. Easy to believe that everything might remain that way.

 _The world tells lies, lufiend. The world tells the sweetest and most vicious lies of all._

No clarity in this. Somewhere the words are spilling out of Carol, pouring like water through a shattered dam, but in Beth's head she's there in the eye of the storm, gaping as bloody chaos screams around her. Because there are screams, it's _all_ screaming: peals of children's laughter contorted into terrified shrieks, shocked yelps and howls, words cried that she can't find the sense of, and a sound she's never heard before - a sound like demons crawling from the deepest pits of Hell, a braying hissing snarl that rips apart the air and tears her eardrums to shreds. Gleam of the muzzle of Rick's gun as it adds its thunder to the chorus, and the flash of Michonne's sword as a song of light. The blur of Morgan's staff. The drumbeat of scattered footfalls, a fresh assault of screams buried under that demon roar, green of crushed grass stained red, the glitter of serpent scales in a cascade of discordant windchimes, the ragged fall of a mangy lion's mane, and the dull, mean slit of a goat's eye.

 _I doubt he even meant to summon it,_ Carol is saying. Her voice is coming from a long way away. _Summon_ something, _sure, sic it on me, but not_ that. _Had to have been an accident. I guess it's possible it was just hanging around the borders of the Scead, in the thin places, waiting for someone stupid or crazy enough to invite it through._

 _Stupid and crazy. That was Ed._

 _Christ, we didn't even know there were any Chimera left._

This is not where everything broke. There is no single moment when that happened. The breaking has been a long process, Beth understands, a process that began centuries before she was born and might go on centuries after she's dead - extending up into the sky to churn the clouds. But this was a point at which the pressure in the fault built to quaking point and everything was laid to waste, and in the end a monster lay dead in the grass with two of its heads rolled feet away and the one remaining barely attached, and Carol was crouched over the twitching body of a man and howling anguish as she carved open his belly and tangled his slippery gray guts around her claws, and Michonne was on her knees, sword loose in her gore-streaked hand, and staring, staring at something Beth can't see and doesn't want to, and Morgan and Rick and Glenn standing like fading shadows, translucent and intangible and completely useless.

And it was all screaming and all quiet. It was so quiet. It is so quiet. It's always quiet when the center can no longer hold. You wouldn't think so, but it is.

The sound of the end of the world is no sound at all.

* * *

"So this isn't even the first time."

Beth blinks, looks up at Michonne. Her muscles are no longer stiff but tingling with emergence from numbness, as if she's one giant waking limb. The sun is too bright, and not for the first time, the angle of it seems overwhelmingly _wrong,_ the workings of time itself failing in some foundational way.

But Michonne is still talking. "I watched my mate die. My son. I couldn't save them. Carol saved Sophia, but she had to kill her own mate. Do you have any idea how strong someone has to be to stay sane after that? To stay _alive?_ This isn't even the worst thing that's ever happened to us, Beth. It's as bad as any of it's ever been, but at the end of the day it's a hit we've taken before. And that's not to say look how fuckin' tough we are. We can only take so much of this. Something out there… It knows that. That's why the punches keep coming."

"You really think that?" Glenn doesn't sound incredulous. Merely tired, sadness hooked in him and dragging him down. "Something specific has it in for us? Painted a _target_ on us?"

Carol huffs a laugh utterly devoid of humor. "Didn't Pythia basically say as much?"

"Hold up," Daryl growls. It's not aggression underlying the roughness. It's denser, more choked. "I still don't get what this has to do with why Rick's tryin' to break your fuckin' nose."

"I left after that." Morgan has lowered the wad of tissues and sits with them cradled in one bloodstained hand, his face calm despite the swelling. "I couldn't… I needed to go, to find something. I didn't know what. I just couldn't stay." He sighs and rolls a shoulder. "Rick sees it as cowardice. I know he does. Hell, probably it was at the time. It was insanity. But I can't change it now."

Beth interlaces her fingers, squeezes. Grounds. She's alive, she's awake, she's surrounded by her bizarre new family, and for the moment she's as safe as she can be anymore. "You're back."

"I am."

"Why?"

Morgan doesn't answer right away. He gazes down at the bloody tissue, eyes half lidded and jaw working slightly. When he finally speaks, he doesn't raise his head. "I need to save that for Rick, when he can hear it."

 _If,_ no one says.

"But I'll tell you this, because it's the most important. It's not what I went out there to find, but I did find it, and it's one of the things that sent me back here. It's also why I can't stay."

 _No one can,_ Beth thinks, fresh exhaustion flooding her. _No one ever can._

"There was a point when we weren't able to find anyone else, were we? We looked, but it was like all the other cyne had vanished. Sure, some of us scattered here and there, but otherwise…" Morgan waves a hand in the air as if clearing smoke. "Not a damn trace."

Michonne cocks her head. "And?"

"They haven't vanished." Morgan smiles grimly. "They're still out there. I've seen them. And they need us just as bad as we need them."


	54. if it lasts forever

**Chapter 54: if it lasts forever, hope I'm the first to die**

The walk up the stairs to her apartment feels three times as long and steep as it should. She's pushing the boulder of herself up a mountain.

She makes it, each slogging step an act of sheer will, and while Daryl's hand at her back is a barely felt pressure, it's steadying and reassuring and most welcome. The urge to sink back against it and let him fully take over the task of propelling her upward is almost irresistible.

He could carry her, she knows, if she fell. He could lift her into his arms, in spite of his own exhaustion, and bear her across her threshold like a bride. She doesn't want him to do that, doesn't want to be that weak now, but simply knowing that he could and _would_ do so lightens the weight on her shoulders. And he _is_ carrying her, somehow. She can feel him inside her, gentle and still strong in spite of everything, warm steel wrapped around her core.

His awe of her. His fierce, bestial love.

Her hands are trembling when she reaches the landing, fumbles in her jacket pocket for her keys and rattles the door open. The room is dim and yellowish in the evening glow of the streetlights outside, and - in a way she can't hope to define - the fact that it's exactly as she left it is disconcerting. It should have changed. Everything else has, good and bad and everywhere in between. There should be differences here, even subtle ones.

Ultimately, though, she doesn't give a shit. She kicks off her boots, shrugs off her jacket and carelessly lets it drop to the floor, stumbles as she passes her rickety card table and catches herself on the back of one of her folding chairs. Behind her, Daryl murmurs quiet concern, but she brushes it away. They've come here because there's nothing else, at present, to be done. Two things are now foremost in her mind, nearly solitary and the objects of every iota of her attention: shower, and bed.

Maybe some painkillers somewhere in between. Maybe not.

Through the window, the light flickers. Possibly a short in one of the streetlights, she thinks vaguely, but the flicker is followed by a low, sullen grumble in the distance and the first fat drops of the storm slap the windowpane. The sky has thickly clouded over, and did a while ago, but she's only noticing it now. The light is fading. The dark is falling.

She's cold.

She sheds her clothes as she goes, and she doesn't look over her shoulder to verify that Daryl is following her. As they usually are, his footfalls are weirdly light, but his presence continues to be a solid thing at her back, the promise of a body pressing against hers. Her shirt over her head and dropped as carelessly as her jacket, the whisper of Daryl's immediately after hers. His heat running along her spine as her clumsy fingers undo her belt and fly and she thumbs her jeans down over her hips and could swear she already feels his hands on her. She knows where this is going. He does too. At the foundation, it's just like it was before: every time they couple now is an act of sheer defiance. It's them hurling life at everything attacking them. She's soaking wet as she steps out of her jeans, unhooking her bra and shivering as the cool air tweaks her nipples, sliding her hand between her thighs and over the drenched fabric of her panties - the lips of her cunt as puffy and sore as if they've been punched, the imagining of her clit big and swollen as a cock.

Christ, she might come the second he touches her.

She doesn't. But as soon as she steps into the bathroom he's on her, gripping her by the back of the neck in a hold as careful as it is ruthless, and she moans softly as he pushes her belly against the sink and snuffles behind her ear, scrapes his teeth across the ridge of her shoulder. She doubts he's going to change this time and that's right, that's how this should go; he still feels so _big_ against her, the head of his cock nudging her ass and streaking precome across her prickled skin. His fingers are rough and blunt as they nose between her legs and under the elastic of her panties, and of course he doesn't have claws like this but the edges of his nails are unnaturally sharp, as if his true self is pressing hard against the membrane of his human skin - his size, the power lurking in him, the points of his incisors digging into her flesh.

She's almost afraid - wonderfully, deliciously afraid - when he enters her with those rough fingers, one and then two, scissoring and testing her. But he doesn't scratch her walls, and like the first time, it doesn't hurt; the same instinct that floods her wet is relaxing her muscles, opening her up for him. And if he doesn't change this time, it'll be a lot easier anyway, but she still feels _stretched,_ filled with him.

Not even remotely as much as she wants to be.

She moans again and it echoes off the tile, and she catches a glimpse of them in the mirror over the sink; she's a fucking disaster, a few smears of blood left at her hairline, her hair a wild tangle, slatey pits under her bloodshot eyes. The skin is broken at her right shoulder - not badly but the clear puncture wounds of predator fangs. Him behind her, looming, his face almost lost beneath his shaggy hair, teeth delicately latching onto the cartilage of her ear as he fucks her with his thick, rough fingers and her juices trickle down the insides of her thighs.

"Afena," he breathes, and then, softer, _agendfra,_ and she whimpers and nods. He might be on the verge of taking her like he's entitled to her, like he _owns_ her, but that couldn't be further from the truth, and now he's asking her permission.

He couldn't have honestly thought she wouldn't give it. But that's not the point.

 _This_ is the point, stripping her panties off, pinning her more firmly as he reaches over with one hand and turns on the spray, and it's mere seconds before she's inhaling steam and he's hauling her into the shower, spinning her around by the hips and kissing her with both hands cupping her jaw to angle her head up. He's been rough with her but the kiss is gentle, coaxing her lips apart - as if she needed coaxing - stroking her tongue with his, sucking at her lips, biting ever so slightly. His cock is a hot length against her belly and she reaches down and takes hold of it, wrapping her hands around it and squeezing as he groans and twitches. It hits her then: a surge of pleasure that she can tell doesn't originate in her, that's coming from him, and she can't help laughing into his mouth as she gives them both more, sweeping her thumb across the slick head and sagging back against the wall.

She wanted this so bad. She wanted it almost since the beginning. Now she has it, and she can recognize it as that same instinct, her body knowing something she didn't. But it's also more than that, so much more; tears lock up her throat as she kisses him deeper, runs a hand through his wet hair, and all the pain that lies behind them is lead in her gut. What they lost to get here. What everyone has lost. The question she asked Lori, to which she received an answer she can't always believe.

 _Is it worth it?_

He's been alone and now he isn't, but no matter how much of him she touches, she knows there are parts of him she'll never be able to heal. Parts she hasn't even totally learned yet.

And God, she wishes she could. Smooth over all those scars. Gift him peace that lasts beyond a few moments.

"I love you," she whispers, and she repeats it, the words broken and aching, when he slides his hands under her ass and lifts her, braces her back into the corner. Her legs hook around his waist before she has to think about it and then he's inside her, one single thrust that shoves a harsh cry out of her, stars exploding in her vision as her neck goes limp and her head hits the tile. All her fantasies of doing exactly this, and naturally once more they turn out to be pathetic compared to the real thing, his teeth closed on the side of her jaw as he fucks her in rapid, merciless bucks of his hips. He's growling and she's sobbing, arching, her arms curled tight around him. All she can do is hang on.

It's clumsy, him obviously doing everything he can to keep from slipping and maybe killing them both in the most horribly absurd way, but it feels so _good,_ grinding her throbbing clit against him as his pleasure pumps into her with his cock. _Fuck you, you evil piece of shit,_ she thinks as she releases another ragged cry. Joe's smug face behind her eyes and then that face twisting into shock as Lori rips into his throat, Len crumpling with Daryl's bolt quivering in his chest, sudden fear contorting all their features. _Fuck you fuck you fuck you_ in the unsteady rhythm of Daryl's thrusts, love and rage scorching the inside of her skin and the certainty that if Daryl can sense it, he'll understand it.

Feel it himself.

This is _why_ it's so good, because those abominations did their worst and they still couldn't take this away. The cyne is still together, even if they're hanging on by the tips of their claws, and she's with them in her blood and her heart, and she's being fucked by her mate, making frantic, ferocious love with him, and power is kindling in her.

And _fuck you_ melts into _fuck me_ as her cries wind to a crescendo, his panting and his rising snarls, and she howls with him as they crest and plunge together, him pulsing deep inside her and her greedy to receive him, the thunder slamming down on the city outside.

When he sinks his teeth into her neck, she twists and sinks her teeth into his, and his blood is like warm honey on her tongue.

* * *

She's half asleep as he begins to wash her. He works the knots out of her hair with exquisite care, passes gentle soapy hands over her skin, drops to his knees to wash her legs. She watches him, eyes heavy-lidded, as he takes hold of her hips and leans in to kiss her pussy, and then moves lower, dragging his mouth down her thighs to her knees, her shins, and finally - practically prostrating himself on the bottom of the tub with his tattoo and his scars standing out dark and defined and bizarrely lovely - lays his lips against the tops of her feet before he takes them in his hands and works the soap over her soles and between her toes.

It tickles a little. She breathes a laugh that's really more of a sigh, and she feels him smiling.

Once it would have bothered her, worship this overt. Once it would have made her squirm, twisted anxiety through her belly like an agitated snake. Now it simply seems appropriate, precisely what he _should_ be doing for his mate and his mistress, and she won't question the obvious pleasure he's taking in it.

Anything that makes him feel good, he should have. He deserves it. He's been denied for so long, he's suffered so much, and she's not fool enough to believe that his suffering is over.

She deserves it too. She's done more than her share of suffering.

He finishes with her, rinses her, and this time she doesn't push to wash him in turn. She stays where she is and drowses as he takes care of himself, efficient and businesslike, and she's docile and obedient when he cuts off the water and helps her out of the tub, bundles her up in a towel and rubs her briskly down.

Same towel he wrapped around his waist that first morning. Standing by her window, moody and smoking, and she was wary of him but not afraid.

She gives him space to dry himself, then leans against him, one hand feeling for the thrum of his heartbeat. He presses his lips to the crown of her head and does what she knew he would eventually do: he lifts her into his arms and carries her to the bed and lays her down. Once again goosebumps rise on her skin as the air dries the last of the damp, and she looks up at him, sleepily musing. The sun was down some time ago, and outside it's another autumn night in Atlanta, much like all the others, the storm subsided to a quiet drumming. It still seems wrong, that utter lack of change, but in this moment it's difficult to be bothered by it. He's crouching over her, touching her face and neck and breasts with the nearly childlike wonder he's possessed since the beginning and hasn't lost, and she dreamily considers the contrast, the beautiful monster who seized her and pinned her and _claimed_ her, and this strange old-young man who appears to be struggling with the idea that she's even real. Who is, even now, a little bit homeless in the world.

A memory, sudden and unexpected and as dreamlike as her thoughts: Daddy's voice and his Bible in his hands.

 _For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known._

 _You were meant for this, Bethy,_ he murmurs. _You were meant for this and it was meant for you. You were meant to have it, and him. See, not everything set out for you is misery._

"Afena." She frames his face with her hands and he bows his head, and _she thinks her heart might burst_ is a cliche out of tens of thousands of mediocre romance novels, but she feels it all the same. "Sleep with me."

Without hesitation, he lowers himself to her side, turns and wraps himself around her. She nestles into his warmth, his strength, and the sigh he lets out sounds far more lupine than human. Turned around three times and flopped contentedly down, nose to tail.

Not _happy._ Happy doesn't fit. With what she's seen and what she knows, what they both know, it doesn't have a place here. But _joy_ is something else, braided with darkness and pain in spite of its brilliance, and it permeates everything.

And they have a right to it.

She's asleep before he is. But not by much.


	55. I'm always in this twilight

This might be the last chapter for a bit. Then again, it might not. But we're entering some more plot-heavy territory and I feel like I need to tread carefully. Not least because I don't even know how many things I've got going on simultaneously in this fucking thing, what the hell. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 55: I'm always in this twilight**

But she doesn't stay asleep.

She's not positive of when she opens her eyes - her phone is in her jeans and her jeans are across the room - but it's even darker than it was, and quiet except for the constant drum of the rain and the lonely wail of sirens in the distance. Daryl is still curled against her back, his arm slung over her side and his palm loosely cupping her breast. His breathing is deep and regular enough that for a few seconds she's sure he's not awake, but then he stirs and she hears the almost inaudible flick of his eyelids.

She doesn't know with any certainty what woke her. But perhaps it was the simple fact of his own wakefulness.

He stirs again when she reaches up and covers his hand with hers, interlaces their fingers and squeezes. "Y'alright?" But he doesn't need to ask. He will always know, now, whether she is or not.

In any case, she doesn't have an easy answer for him.

She turns in his arms, facing him with one arm crooked beneath her head. The thin light from the window is cast across his face, highlighting the jut of his cheekbone, the scattered silver hairs in his beard, the glittering caverns of his eyes. He lifts a hand and combs stray locks of hair back from her brow, and her breath trembles slightly as she exhales. He loves her so much that it's devastating. It's cracking open his skin, bleeding out of him. It hurts to be in such close proximity to it, to _feel_ it working its way into her like heat.

She's very, very afraid that she might not be able to love him that way. Because she might not be able to love _anyone_ that way. It's possible that the part of her that once could have is too thickly scarred over. The thought didn't scare her before but it does now: that she might be too broken to be what he deserves.

These are late night thoughts, the kind that force their way in when the darkness is at its most formidable and one's defenses are at their weakest. She wants to believe that.

She nearly manages to.

"What're we gonna do?"

He shakes his head, best he can lying down. "Wait. 's all we _can_ do."

"For what?"

"For Rick. For him to call. He brings us in, we figure out our next move." He sounds positive, devoid of any doubts, but it's like she's tucked into his heart, and she knows better.

Her brow furrows. "You really think he'll be able to?"

"He's strong. Strong as any of us, and it's not like none of us have faced it before. Michonne made it through. Carol."

"You," she whispers, and she watches for his reaction. She gets it, though it's barely perceptible: he twitches, gaze sliding away from her, and she knows that he had expected this to come up and had hoped very much that it wouldn't. The things that were hinted at while Carol was telling her story, talked around, but none of them touched directly. The tethers she sensed extending between Carol and him, invisible cords that had always been there but that she only now experienced with such clear definition. What Shane said. She has a _weakness for strays._

Carol and Daryl aren't from the same world. They haven't lived the same life. But they're closer than most would ever want to be.

He ducks his head, a nod that passes quickness and manages to be almost brusque, and blinks past her at the barred pattern of light thrown on the wall from the window. The light is spattered with moving spots of dark as the rain hits the window and trickles downward; Beth can't see it straight-on from where she's lying but she's laid awake so many goddamn times and done exactly what he's doing, stared at those blurry raindrop shadows until the whole world melts into them.

"What your dad did," she persists - gently, so gently. "To you. Your brother. Your mom. Except him and her were human, right? So it was like in reverse, only-"

"Beth." He cuts her off with the same gentleness she was using to prod him onward, and she's left speechless, throat working. "Please."

She lets him be. Her sole movement is to lay her hand over his hip and shift herself closer to him, and it's not totally an attempt to offer him comfort, but it's not far off. His distress isn't as intense as it might be, but it's palpable, twisting itself around her muscles and winching them tight. It's complex unhappiness, present and fresh but with old roots that go down a long, long way, and she can feel a keen edge of shame lurking in its background. She remembers what he said about honor - _arweor_ \- and about how he didn't have any before this, and she intuits that it's a kind of honor won and lost for you by others rather than something you win or lose for yourself.

His father dishonored him. Stole something from him, before he was even born. Committed some unforgivable sin, and he's carried it on his back for all these years even if it wasn't a sin of his own. She can't fully understand the pain in that. But now she can feel some of it, and it stings like a slap in the face.

"What Carol said," he says at last, softly. Reluctantly. "Everythin' goin' bad, and Heala's included. When you're bound to someone like that… It should make you stronger. But when it goes bad, it can make you weaker. If the other one is weak. It can trap you. Ruin you."

"It didn't use to do that," she murmurs, and it's not completely a question.

He nods, his eyes so dark. "Not hardly ever. But more in the last hundred years or so. It rips cyne apart. It gets people killed. You saw."

 _Saw._ Not _heard._

"Your dad," she says again - she can feel that he's ready for it now, that he's gotten there more at his own pace, and he offers her another nod.

"Took her from her folks, from everyone. They were alone with no cyne. That's how it starts to go wrong, I think. We need a pack. We need each other. It's no good for us to be alone."

"Did she want to go?"

Pause. A long one. "No," he says finally. "She couldn't have. It wasn't even his choice, really. They threw him out. I never really knew why, but he was… He did somethin', somethin' so bad they couldn't have him around, which means it was _bad._ She didn't want any of what happened. But it was like Carol. She couldn't get away."

Beth bites her lip, watches the light ripple more quickly across his face as a car passes. She tries to imagine it and she can't. Feeling _trapped_ that way, like he said - she realized at some point that she couldn't stop what was happening to her here, and that was terrifying in its way, but in the heart of her heart she wanted it, and it wasn't something she was being _made_ to want.

She wants him because she loves him. Nothing else matters.

"Did she ever try?"

"I dunno." He turns his head more fully into the pillow, almost as if he's attempting to hide - from her, from everything, from something he can't hope to get away from. His pain jabs into her gut and she hisses in a breath, curling a hand around the side of his neck and pressing her brow against his.

"You don't have to-"

"She died," he whispers hoarsely. "So she did get away. In the end."

Then she hears it right in the center of her head, as clearly and sharply as if he snarled it aloud with every particle of anguish and shame and hatred he feels: _And she fuckin' left me. The bitch left me with_ him _._

It's not telepathy. She doesn't believe that she needs to define it. It merely is.

Her hand strokes up to his jaw and then to his cheek, her thumb sweeping across his cheekbone, and she sees the tears glistening there at the same instant she feels the wetness, and her heart turns over in her chest, blocking off her lungs. "But your brother got away too." _Christ,_ in the worst way possible, perhaps worse even than death. She immediately wishes she hadn't mentioned it. " _You_ did."

"Not until he was dead."

 _Oh._ She searches his face in the dimness, though precisely what she's hunting for is unknown to her. "How?"

"Don't." Still not angry. He's pleading with her, just as before. If she dragged it out of him he wouldn't resist her, but it would hurt him every second like the pulling of a tooth, and she won't. She won't do that to him. "I can't."

Even now, his own scars are too thick to allow him to tell her everything.

"Alright."

She lies there, silent and motionless, for another few moments, and he lies there with her and lets her touch him, just as silent as she is even with the tears streaking over the bridge of his nose. One trickles lower, over the curve of his lips, and she doesn't hesitate; she closes the last of the distance between him and catches it with her mouth, salt on her tongue. Not like his sweat, his blood, or his come, but it's _him,_ that essence she's been ravenous for since she first scented and tasted him, and as she is with those other things, she's thirsty for more. So all at once she's licking over his cheek, slow and careful, humming low in her throat as she laps up his tears, and his hand is tight on her waist and then her hip, leg slung over hers.

No surprise when she slips her hand between them and finds him hot and hard and slick, straining for her and twitching against her belly when she groans and rolls herself against him.

 _It doesn't matter,_ she thinks fiercely as she strokes him, squeezes the base of his cock and swallows his choked whimper. _It doesn't matter what happened. You're here. You're here now. You're mine._

It _does_ matter, it's always going to matter, every bit as much as her stumbling away from her burning home with her father's head cradled in her arms, but if she could just shove it all back into that fire and watch it go up in a cascade of sparks, leave only this - what she's feeling, what she's making _him_ feel, licking deep into his mouth and angling her pelvis upward to press him against her mound.

Distant growl of thunder. He drowns it out with his own, catches her nipple between his forefinger and thumb, and it's her turn to whimper and shiver as he pinches her and tugs. All the times she's done it to herself don't hold a single candle to the small, exquisite pain he's giving her, electric spikes jabbing straight down into her cunt. She's already lifting her whimper into a sharp whine when his teeth close on her neck and the head of his cock nudges her swollen clit, and the waves of heat blur what vision she has left.

The air is cool on the insides of her thighs when she parts them for his hand - wet, sticky sound as she does and an even wetter squelch when he presses a finger into her and crooks it into her wall. She's so ready for him. She can't imagine _not_ being ready for him. She can't imagine not being desperate for him to fuck her, can't imagine doing anything but scrambling to comply when he turns her roughly over and hauls her against his heaving chest, lifting her top leg up and back so far her hamstring yelps in protest and she yelps with it. Not telling him to stop, no, nothing of the fucking _kind,_ and she's groping for him, seizing him and guiding him into her and sobbing as he forces her open.

Force, even if she wants it so fucking bad. She has all the power here, and she wants to use that power to make him overpower _her,_ the wolf snarling behind the veil of his skin and pinning her down with his teeth digging into the taut flesh of her shoulder as he fucks her into a rapid, furious rhythm. If she genuinely tried to fight him, he would back off without a breath of argument, but if the fight was playing, she could never hope to escape him. So she clutches the sheet with one trembling hand and clumsily rubs her clit with the other, biting blindly at the pillow with the smell of blood thin and sharp in her nose.

It's over too fast. Somehow it always is, no matter how long it actually lasts. He stiffens and goes rigid, his jaws clamp down and a short, ragged scream rips out of her, and then he's wracked with a single long convulsion as he gushes hot into her, flooding her own climax through her in a scorching, brilliant rush.

He fills her. And then she's empty again when he leaves her, or she will be, and even though he's already softening she hisses and flexes the muscles of her cunt like she can hold him inside her, keep him there until he can take her again.

Over and over and fucking _over._

For now he's clinging to her and panting against the back of her neck, her skin burning where he bit her, and she smiles at the idea that he might eventually scar her, leave marks on her that only death will erase.

And not even then. One way or another, he'll go with her into the ground.

Or the fire.

* * *

She doesn't remember him slipping out of her. She sinks into a kind of softly drumming darkness, the wind picking up and sighing as it flings rain against the window, and when she's aware of herself again it's as it was before and he's lying along her back, arm slung over her middle and his face buried in her hair, his breath warm on her scalp. She's lost whatever sense of time she had retained, and now she might be drifting with him in no time at all - the Benescead, raw and formless, nothing but the potential of everything.

 _Kindling._

It might only be the rain playing more havoc with the light, but she blinks slowly and could swear she sees flames in the dark. They're dancing, beckoning her, and she wants to go to them, but she can't leave him. Can't free herself.

Doesn't _want_ to be freed.

Drifting again. Then she's falling back into the world to discover herself turning in his embrace and pushing him over onto his back, climbing on top of him and pinning his hardening cock between their bodies as she scrapes her teeth across his collarbone. He murmurs sleepily, loose hands settling over her hips, but she doesn't wait for him to return fully to her; she _wants_ and she's going to have _,_ half asleep herself and dreaming of those leaping flames. She reaches down and grips him, moans thickly as she lifts and lowers herself onto him. He arches under her, whispers _Agendfra, besece,_ and then she's riding him, her nails sinking into his chest as she bares her teeth and works herself into an uneven, stuttering roll.

It drenches her and soaks through her skin, how good it feels to take him like he took her, and a chaos of sensation rises all around her - the itch of her sweat as it trickles down between her shoulderblades, the muddled sounds of the tired springs squeaking and their gasping and his helpless groans, copper in her mouth as she bites down on her cut lip, a hot piercing shudder running from the core of her pussy all the way up to the top of her head. It's like she's already coming, like she was coming the second she impaled herself on him. She throws her head back and releases a harsh, grating animal sound as once again she clenches around him, loosens, clenches, as if she's trying to jerk his semen out of him with her pelvic muscles alone.

There's no buildup, no crescendo; he cries out and bucks up into her and wet heat blooms inside her, and she sobs his name as flames lick up the walls of her mind.

It's not enough. Her body is starving for him. She's nearly weeping with it as she collapses onto his chest, pressing her face into the hollow of his throat and quivering with aftershocks. He circles his arms around her and mouths something against her brow, and she knows it's never going to stop. She was wrong about this, they both were: mating doesn't mean they've finally been sated.

It means they'll always be hungry.

* * *

Dark, and rain. But now she can detect a hint of light in the darkness, light that isn't electric, and the rain has once again subsided to little more than the tapping of lazy claws on the glass. She stands naked at the window and stares down at the deserted street, sash half lifted and wet-chilled air raising goosebumps on her skin, one hand braced against the windowframe and a cigarette dangling between her fingers.

She lifts it to her lips and inhales deeply as she turns her head to look at him. He's sprawled on his side exactly as she left him, sheet tangled around his waist and one leg partially exposed beyond its edge, strands of his damp hair swept across his cheek like shadows. As she always has and always will, she looks at him and thinks that he's beautiful. Sleep smooths him out. It doesn't lift the years away from him, but it does seem to reduce their weight, and it's very easy to see the boy beneath the skin of the man, clear to her as the wolf beneath the skin of the human.

This is the creature with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life. It's not a mystery to her. But she can't hope to understand it. Her heart pounds against her breastbone and tears sting in the corners of her eyes like smoke.

More tears. The last forty-eight hours have been soaked in them.

She hurts. She hurts _everywhere._ She can't take a step without fighting a wince, her muscles strained and shaky and her pussy one giant ache, and when she raises her hand to the base of her throat she flakes away crusted blood. He whimpers, twitches, and it occurs to her that he can sense her pain even in his sleep, and even if it doesn't trouble her, it's upsetting to him.

And she can't explain to him that she's treasuring every thread of it. She's knotting each one around herself, bright strings of memory decorating her knuckles. If he hadn't hurt her, something wouldn't have been right.

 _It always hurts, being born._

She draws smoke into her lungs and closes herself around its dull burn, shutting her eyes to seal it in and leaning her forehead against the cool glass. She should try to sleep again. Fuck knows how many more chances for it she'll have. She should return to him, fall into what's become her marriage bed, nestle into the shelter of his body and search for him in her dreams. Run with him there under the stars and the moon.

Run wild.

Sudden ripple of warmth. Heat. She opens her eyes and looks down at the same instant she raises her hand. The cigarette trembles between her forefinger and thumb.

Fire uncoils in the center of her palm.

* * *

When she next tumbles into wakefulness, the dark is gone, and the anemic dawn light that's replaced it slaps at her eyes as if she's waking into the dregs of a hangover. She groans and burrows her face into the pillow; behind her, Daryl echoes the groan with a depth and a density that tells her he's still extremely asleep.

Lucky asshole.

After a brief struggle with the covers, she flops onto her back and blinks up at the ceiling, the heel of her palm pressed against one eye until her vision is overlaid with pale static like a bad TV signal. She didn't just _wake up,_ not spontaneously, and little by little, as the world peels the last of her unconsciousness away, she realizes what it is that dragged her out of herself.

Her phone is buzzing.

Across the room in the rumpled pile of her clothing, vibrating against the floorboards. As prospects go, getting up to answer it is supremely unattractive. It's a much better idea to stay here, stay with him, scavenge whatever scraps of escapism she can, because when reality reasserts itself, it's going to make the slapping of the daylight feel like love taps on her skull.

The phone stops buzzing. _Thank Christ._

And starts up again.

For another round of it, she simply lies there, listening and considering whether it really _is_ possible to make something go away by denying its existence. It's not, she knows perfectly fucking _well_ that it's not, she's tried it a hundred times already, so when the phone sets into a third round she squirms free from him, hauls herself up, and thumps unsteadily across the floor to crouch and dig through her discarded shirt and jeans.

She doesn't bother checking the number. Her thumb touches green and she rocks back on her heels, the hiss of an open line in her ear.

"Yeah?"

" _Beth?_ " Glenn. She shouldn't be surprised, and she's not, but she's immediately, alarmingly alert, every muscle in her gut tensed as if she's expecting a punch. More bad news. Has to be. They're due.

"What is it?"

" _We're back at the hospital. All of us. You and Daryl need to get over here._ "

 _Of course._ One funeral already to plan: now they can make it a double. She wipes childishly at her face, sucking in a breath. "What's goin' on?"

 _She's dead._ Except no. Fractions of a second before he speaks, she knows that's not what he's going to say. And she knows that nothing from here on is going to be any easier, because how could it be? How could it possibly go any other way?

No one has done them any favors here. None at all.

" _Lori's awake._ "


	56. low have been the odds

**Chapter 56: low have been the odds**

Beth doesn't even know how many times she's walked through these doors, but this time she's struggling to keep from breaking into a run. Daryl knows - of course he knows - and he's not gripping her hand but his own is a slight, solid weight at the small of her back, and when she feels the force of his calm it's no surprise to her. There's a desperate quality in it, a sense that it's something he's fighting for, but it's no less an anchor for that.

In any case, the place doesn't _choke_ her the way it has before. Possibly it's that she's rushing too fast for it to touch her. Possibly it's that she's being choked by something entirely other - that nightmare flash she had the night they spent here, Lori full of tubes in that bed the last memory Beth would have of her, the last hours and minutes of her life, because Beth isn't fool enough to think that the fact of Lori's consciousness is any guarantee that she'll live.

And Beth can't stay away from her now. That choice has been taken away from her.

She should be happy, hopeful, and she is. Part of her. But she's also not.

The time and space between the lobby and the ICU is a sallow, buzzing blur. She blinks and she's there, standing surrounded by a deeper and more threatening version of that buzz, as if she's stepped into the part of the hive where the soldier bees make their home. High, rhythmic beeps, chirps, the songs of bloodless birds. The shuffle of hurrying feet. Tense voices. Muffled crying.

Somehow the sounds are the worst part.

His hand again, this time on her shoulder, and then she sees them toward the end of the room, a little crowd half hidden behind a privacy screen. Glenn's back, Michonne's.

Shane's broad shoulders, hanging back at the edges.

She notices that. In the first few seconds of processing, she notices it more prominently than anything else - though she couldn't say why. In any case, the first few seconds are all her mind devotes to his presence. Almost immediately it switches its attention to the rest of them, and as she moves forward again, her angle of sight changes and and her eyes land on Michonne's pinched, tired face, and on Glenn, whose expression is shifting rapidly back and forth between anxiety and relief, so fast the two merge. Carol's face still isn't visible, and Beth is almost at the bedside when she realizes who _isn't_ there.

No Morgan.

And no Rick.

But there is Lori. She comes into view all at once and Beth halts, everything else in the room fading into a distant background, the family around her doing the same. All she can perceive now is Lori, and it's awful, because Lori is exactly as she pictured and exactly as she never wanted to meet her.

Tubes. Tape. Needles and beeping machines. Plastic and roughly utilitarian fabric and gleaming stainless steel. But Lori's eyes are open, and though there's a hazy quality to them, a sense that she's looking at all of them through a fog, they're more alert than Beth ever hoped to see again.

There's more. She didn't expect this part. Maybe it shouldn't bother her as much as it is, because it's such a minor thing on top of everything else, but it _is_ bothering her, and she clenches her fists and bites down on her lip as her gut twists around itself.

Beneath the bandages, she can see that Lori's head has been shaved.

Michonne looks up from where she's partially bent over the bed and sees them, gives Beth a thin, tired smile. There's no true relief in that smile. That's not just about the precariousness of Lori's condition, Beth is certain; even if Lori was fine…

Even if Lori was fine, they would still have to plan her daughter's funeral.

Carol shifts a little to the left to make a place for Beth and Daryl, her hand briefly coming to rest on Beth's shoulder as she offers a smile that's practically identical to Michonne's. There's something about the quality of the light that sucks the color out of her, sucks it out of everyone, and the effect serves to make Beth feel even more as if she's locked into something that can't quite figure out if it wants to be a dream or a nightmare and is veering nauseatingly back and forth between the two.

Beth takes a breath, speaks low and quiet. Not to Lori, and the fact that Lori might very well be able to hear and understand her doesn't help her discomfort. Talking about someone like they aren't even there; that's a nice way to be welcomed back into the world.

"When did she-?"

"About forty minutes ago," Glenn murmurs. "I called you as soon as we heard." He raises his head and glances around with obvious unease, as if afraid that they might be caught doing something they're not supposed to be doing. "I don't know if a crowd this big is okay. They might kick us out any second."

Daryl grunts. There's a lot unspoken in the sound, and Beth can feel its outlines. _Let 'em fuckin' try._ "She say anythin'?"

"Not yet." Michonne shakes her head and shoots Lori a glance that Beth can only interpret as apologetic. "I did manage to talk to the doctor again. She said they're not sure what she'll be able to do yet, but talking doesn't seem like it's on the list right now."

Beth is opening her mouth to ask something else, something she would really prefer not to ask at all but which is unavoidable - _do you have any idea how much she knows_ \- when Lori makes a raspy coughing sound, and her hand jerks on the blanket. Immediately Michonne bends lower, strokes her fingertips down Lori's pallid cheek as her own features tighten with concern. "You okay, Lori? You breathing alright?"

A bobbing of the head that Beth - staring and half dazed - takes for a nod. Lori's hand twitches again, her fingers gathered together in a way that looks both weird and extremely familiar, and the twitch appears more intentional than a random muscle spasm should. Lori repeats the motion a third time, more violently, and Carol catches Lori's hand in her own.

"Get a nurse over here," she says, her voice painfully tight. "Doctor, goddamn _janitor,_ anyo-"

"No." Daryl holds up a hand, and the rest of them fall silent, looking at him. His own gaze is on Lori's trapped hand, his eyes brilliant and frightened and with no sign of budging. "Ain't nothin' wrong with her. Not like that, anyhow."

Carol tilts her head, distinctly lupine. Not scoffing or even really doubting him, but curious. Requiring answers. "What makes you say that?"

"'cause I know what I saw." An edge of annoyed impatience has crept into his voice - exactly the kind of thing she knows he dislikes and yet can't stop. "C'mon, you all saw it. You're seriously tellin' me you didn't recognize what she was doin'?"

Glenn and Michonne look at each other, at Carol, back at Beth - and, by extension Beth suspects, Daryl himself - quizzically, shake their heads again. Glenn breathes a confused laugh, the kind of laugh someone makes when they're at a loss to do much else. "Should we have?"

Daryl sighs. At another time their bewilderment might have come across as comical. Now it's irritating. Understandable, but still irritating. Beth feels all of this as if the world was a TV show behind her eyes, Daryl's own mind the screen through which she sees everything. It's disorienting, and she plants her feet more solidly against the ground. "You wanna make yourselves useful? Any one'a you? Get out there and get her paper and a pen."

He's telling them, but he's already turning - Beth presumes to follow his own instructions - and Glenn is following him. Two people should be enough, and if more assault the staff, Beth doesn't imagine it'll end well. Instead she moves closer, filling the gap Glenn left, and when she looks down into Lori's face, those haunting eyes fix hers.

Not just haunting. Haunted. Again, the question - and she can't bear to ask it now: _How much do you remember?_

Beth can't decide if it would be better or worse for her to remember everything. If she remembers nothing. If someone has to tell her all of it. Or if she knows, and she's trapped with it inside her own head and her own silence, here in this unfriendly place that reeks of sickness and death.

Without her mate at her side.

Maybe Beth shouldn't be angry at Rick, she thinks. But she is. In this moment, very suddenly, she is so fucking angry.

She's also - suddenly, as sudden as her anger - once more unaware of anything else around her. Michonne and Carol and Shane recede almost to nothing, to the shadows of indistinct shadows in the background. There are only the beeps and hums of the machines keeping Lori alive, the gleam of the steel and the shine of the plastic, and her eyes on Beth's, boring into her. Remembering. Knowing. The ghost of that final, horrible light flashing in the black pits of her pupils.

Sound approaching. Glenn's voice, and the deep warmth in her chest that now announces Daryl's proximity. But still only Lori, all that matters, and as she watches, a tear gathers at the corner of Lori's right eye and trickles down the side of her face as she blinks.

Beth drags in a trembling breath, and then Michonne is taking the scrap of notepaper from Glenn and sliding it under Lori's hand, curling her fingers around the pen and holding them there to help. her grip.

A few airless seconds of nothing. Then Lori's hand moves in Michonne's, shakily scratches across the ragged little page. Shane has moved nearer, and Beth feels the weight of five pairs of eyes - not counting her own - as if Lori is as close to her mind as Daryl.

Michonne follows the course of the pen, and when it stops and Lori's hand sags, she reads the words aloud in a voice as shaky as Lori's hand.

 _Where's Rick?_

Michonne doesn't wait for anyone else to answer. She lifts her free hand and touches Lori's cheek again, smudging away the track of her tears. "I'm not sure. Morgan showed up, I think they might be together."

A moment's pause. A shudder runs through Lori's body, and it seems to pass into the rest of them, fluttering in a wave through their nerves. Then the pen is moving again. Michonne waits, peers, reads. And as she does, two simple words, her voice breaks on the second.

 _Judy dead?_

All around, their heads droop. Their entire bodies droop, shoulders slumping as if a weight has settled on them. Michonne swallows, pinches the bridge of her nose, and nods.

This time Lori's pause is longer, stretching out - and there's somehow a sharpness in it, cold as the gleaming steel. Lori stares up at the ceiling, and Beth sees that her fingers are tightening around the pen with a strength she shouldn't possess, tensing until her knuckles are pale.

Moving.

 _Carl?_

Michonne glances up at them, her eyes glistening wet and her teeth capturing her lip. And Beth senses all over again how the pain isn't remotely confined to Lori and Rick, how badly this has wounded all of them. How they're holding together, at least for now, but they're struggling. And it's not even over.

She doesn't want to think it. Doesn't want to believe it. But she doubts that, after this one, they'll be done with funerals.

"He's alright. They say he'll be ready to go home today." _Home_. Whatever home means anymore. If he would even _want_ to return there, to where the ground is soaked with blood even if no one can see it. Probably police tape strung like ribbons. The house in the kind of disarray that can only be caused by people who care nothing for it - the monsters and well-meaning officers alike, though she wants to believe that the latter would be more careful, as well as more respectful of one of their own. And possibly they would be.

At some point she has to have faith in something.

Lori draws a breath, manages a tiny nod, and the pen slips from her fingers as her hand abruptly goes limp and her eyes fall closed. Gone. Not as gone as she might have been, but Beth watches her as she sinks away from them, back into the darkness from which she briefly fought her way free.

But it was something. It was something, where she had frankly expected nothing at all.

"Okay, what the hell is this?" A terse voice behind them; as one their heads turn, and standing there with her arms crossed and her brow furrowed is a tall, muscular nurse with close-cropped black hair and an expression on her broad face that indicates a total lack of patience. She points at Michonne. "I said you could visit her. _You_. I didn't say y'all could have a damn party in my unit. Get outta here, all of you. Now."

Glenn opens his mouth, but Carol touches his arm, shakes her head. Michonne steps forward, shooting a look back at the rest of them. "She's right. We need to let her be. Nothing more we can do now anyway."

Nothing more, no. _Will she wake up again?_ But like those other questions, there's no point in asking. She knows there won't be an answer, at least nothing comforting. She could feel it, clear and real as if Lori herself was explaining it to her: Lori is still fighting. She's fighting for her fucking life.

 _But she's fighting._

Daryl's hand settles once more on her shoulder as they file out of the ICU, light and so welcome, and she reaches up and back to curl her own hand around it and squeeze. It's still awful. It's absolutely awful, it's not _finished_ being awful, and in fact she's all but certain that soon it's going to be awful in a whole host of new ways.

But Lori isn't the only one among them who's still fighting. And not a single one of them is fighting alone.

* * *

They're barely out and into the hall that leads back to the waiting room in which they've been camped when an elevator door a few yards ahead of them opens, and out steps Rick, Morgan close behind.

The entire cyne practically skids to a halt, the atmosphere immediately chilled and uneasy. Beth glances side to side at Daryl, at Michonne - and at Shane, in the corner of the left side of her vision.

And if he's trying to hide the freezing darkness that passes across his face - quick but unmistakable - he does a shit job.

But then there's Rick's face.

Since she saw it that first time, reflected in the windowpane as he stared out at night-blanketed Atlanta, she hasn't known what to do with it. Has barely known how to read it. Seeing it directly when he came to Morgan that first time, when he knocked the man down, she was at even more of a loss. The sheer depth of his pain and his rage, the bloody rawness of his despair. The way the three combined in him to create the worst madness she's ever come face to face with. Something she could scarcely bear to look at.

She wondered - wonders - if she looked like that, when her life went up in flames.

Now, she supposes she would have to call what she sees _better,_ but that's not a high bar to clear. He's pale, hollow, his eyes sunken and colorless. What's behind those eyes is desolate, a wasteland. The insanity isn't gone; it's only receded like a dark tide. For perhaps the first time, it occurs to her that he may have been absent from Lori's bedside because he simply couldn't stand to see her that way.

To let her see him.

It's not an excuse. But if it's true, Beth thinks she understands. A little.

Morgan, for his part, looks essentially as he did, aside from his moderately swollen nose. He's calm, his head raised and his staff held close at his side. Interesting that no one has tried to get him to stop carrying it around. Unless they have.

Rick gazes at them for a moment or two, wordless. Then he releases a sigh and shuts his eyes, appearing to gather something inside himself. Not quite pulled together, but he's trying. And that's something too.

When he opens his mouth to speak, she's expecting something about Lori. But that's not what they get. His voice is clipped and emotionless, and rough, as if he's been screaming. Or sobbing.

Or both.

"Need you all to come with me." He opens his eyes again, the flatness in him still clear and unbroken. "We need to have a gedrag. Morgan has some things to tell us."

 _Gedrag_. The word is unfamiliar but the meaning comes to her even as he says it. _Meeting_. To gather. To discuss.

That he's thinking that far ahead, she supposes, is a good sign.

Michonne cocks her head, every muscle in her body still betraying wariness. Not of Morgan, or at least not exactly. More a general kind of guard-up, as if she's half expecting an attack to come from anywhere. "About what?"

Rick's mouth tightens, and the temperature of the air drops by another degree or two. But the challenge isn't directed at him - Beth is almost sure - and she can't detect any of his figurative hackles rising. No more than they're already raised.

But before he can answer, Morgan steps forward. "About what I said earlier. Why we haven't been able to find any of the other cyne. Why we haven't heard from them. More than that. What's going on, what we're up against. Why Rick's child was killed."

Rick flinches. It's barely perceptible, but Beth perceives it, and a twinge of pain twists through her. If he's like this now…

"I'm assuming it's not good news," Carol says quietly, and Morgan shakes his head before she's even done speaking.

"No. It's not." He gives them a small smile - grim, but a smile nonetheless. "But it's not the only news I got."


	57. in the fabric of a world

You might note that the tags for this have changed somewhat. Namely, one specific big one. Yeah, this is now officially a crossover; I'm using enough of the worldbuilding from Stephen King's _Dark Tower_ series that I pretty much have to. For those of you who aren't familiar with that universe, I wouldn't worry - I'm still writing this with the assumption that I'm introducing the entire fic universe to someone who doesn't already know it the way I do.

Long story short: people who have read the _Dark Tower_ books are likely to get a tiny bit more out of some of the allusions, but everyone should be able to understand what's happening regardless.

There is also a brief reference to another fic of mine that some of you have read and some of you haven't - The Demon Moon (available only on AO3. Again, if you haven't read it, not a big deal. Shouldn't get in the way. But that fic and this are pretty strongly connected in some deep ways.

It is frankly terrifying to me how big and complicated this world has become. I'm still working with it. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 57: in the fabric of a world that's going threadbare**

In the end, they go to the Frithus.

It feels strange to return there. Feels wrong, even. Daryl's bike and two cars, all swinging into the cracked, weedy lot, and even if it's high noon by now, all the light around them seems to dim as soon as their tires cross the broken line through the broken fence that separates their territory from the rest of Atlanta.

Beth lifts her head from between Daryl's shoulderblades and blinks as they approach the hulk of the building, glancing around. Did it darken this way before? Is it new? She should be able to recall, and she can't. Nothing feels the way it did. Nothing looks quite right, even if last night she was thinking about how obscene it was that so much appeared to be the same. Is it her? Or is it some fundamental quality in the fabric of everything that's shifted, that's still shifting, that's heading ever more quickly toward even worse disaster?

That's a stupid question. It's the latter. She already knows it is. Because she closes her eyes, and she understands almost none of it and has no desire to do so, but she sees that damn Tower.

 _What'll happen if it falls?_

 _The end. Of all those worlds. Every one._

She closes her eyes again as Daryl pulls to a stop in front of the loading dock, the two cars behind him. It's only to gather herself, but then for a fraction of a sickening fraction of a second, the entire world tilts, quivers, _thins,_ and as she sucks in a breath and clutches at Daryl's leather with numb fingers, the red darkness on the other side of her own eyelids tears open and spews-

"Beth?"

She jerks backward, hands flying up to protect herself against something her brain can't articulate, and Daryl twists at the waist and barely manages to catch her by the arms before she tumbles off the bike.

" _Beth_."

"I'm fine," she whispers, but it's reflexive and it's also not true. Everything is swimming back into focus, his worried eyes inches from hers the clearest of all, and she senses him searching her, like gentle fingers feeling their way carefully beneath her skin and into the deeper parts of her.

Not frightening. Not a violation. She tips her forehead against his and welcomes him - and in a few more seconds, her breath is coming slower. The voice in her head isn't her or him alone but both of them together, in one tongue and in perfect unison.

 _Afena. Agendfra. Sweetheart, you're right here._

 _We both are._

Dimly, beyond the more peaceful space they've spun around themselves, she hears his name and hers in multiple other voices. This time she's blinking dreamily as she looks up and around, the silhouettes against the sky coming gradually into view as Carol and Glenn. Carol is reaching for her, but as her hand settles over Beth's shoulder, Beth shrugs her away. No force or irritation, but the second she's touched - and it's not Daryl - her stomach tightens, a hint of adrenaline buzz released into her veins.

"I'm fine," she repeats, and this time she means it. Mostly. Close enough, anyway, and when Daryl takes her upper arm and steadies her as she climbs off the bike, it's not much needed.

But him, she doesn't shrug off.

Rick, Shane, Michonne, and Morgan have gotten out of their respective vehicles and are standing by the wide black maw of the doorway at the top of the ramp - lost in shadow even in the middle of the day. Michonne, Shane, and Morgan are standing relatively close together, but Rick is at a distance, closest to the door, and the way his arms are dangling at his sides jabs unease into her. She can't quite make out his face, as if the sunlight is reluctant to touch him, but his stance is expressive enough.

It's not that she expected him to be okay. But he's so far from it. And she thinks of Carl still in the hospital - not just Lori, though Lori is bad enough - and somewhere in some cold morgue, the body of his daughter is waiting for him.

He's dragging himself forward. Because it's all he can do.

"Alright?" Michonne's voice is concerned, though not alarmed, and before either Carol or Daryl can say anything, Beth nods.

"Just got dizzy for a sec." She shrugs. "I'm tired." Not a lie, but she knows Daryl will immediately see through it, and he catches her hand and squeezes, all his question in the pressure.

She squeezes back. _Later_. Later, if she can figure out how to put it into words.

Though she may not even need to. To a greater or lesser extent, they're beyond words now.

Rick bobs his chin at the doorway, turns. "C'mon," he says - somewhere between a mutter and a snap, distinctly inhuman, and as they follow, she realizes that she doesn't actually know what language he was speaking.

Not that it matters.

The darkness swallows the rest of the cyne, and then her.

* * *

They stop almost immediately inside the doorway, that opaque false night now obscuring the world beyond it, and Rick turns back to them, arms folded. It's difficult to be certain whether or not he's angry - and then she _is_ certain: of course he's angry. He's angry all the time now. Or not anger, because anger isn't enough: he's drowning in his own frozen rage, and the only questions are how much of it he shows and how much of his actions he allows it to rule.

Now she mostly senses the coldness. It's hard and brittle, and it cracks the edges of the space like frost.

"Here," he says, another one of those low lupine sounds, more between a growl and a quiet bark, and as if in response to a command he didn't voice, the rest of them shift into a kind of circular arrangement and sink down crosslegged onto the concrete floor. The only light is entering through the high lines of grimy windows and the cavernous room is dim, the shadows encroaching. Beth is just wondering if anyone is going to do anything about that when Morgan moves into the center of the circle and sits with his staff laid at his side, raises a cupped hand, and unsheathes a knife in a quick, smooth motion. She blinks and it's in his other hand, blade flashing dull silver, and with the same smooth quickness he draws it across his open palm.

Once it probably would have surprised her. Even alarmed her. Now it does neither of those things, and while she isn't expecting it and doesn't fully understand its significance, she's also not surprised when Morgan whispers a short series of words over the bloody line spreading across his skin and a pale flame - nearly white - flares into being.

"Asieh, Mona," Rick says, his voice quiet and emotionless, and the flame rises, curls, and rolls itself into a sphere as it ascends over Morgan's head. The light it casts on them doesn't resemble firelight in the least, and she does understand. Or she understands enough. This isn't just a meeting. It's far more formal. _Gedrag_. And Rick is speaking again. "Eldra suster, sceawian thes gedrag, ond gelyfan us afaran horscunian gecomon."

 _Behold, Mona. Elder sister, mark this gedrag, and let us depart wiser than we came._

Not exactly a prayer. But an invocation.

For a moment there's silence. Then everything changes.

It's barely discernible. Nothing visible, nothing that Beth can see or hear, smell or taste in the air or feel on her skin. Nevertheless, it changes, a shift far beneath the surface, like the subtle movement of tectonic plates. The sphere of pale fire is high above them now, turning slowly, and Beth watches it with her lips slightly parted, half entranced. She knows what's happened. With an instinct that rests in her marrow, she knows what this is. Her ancestors knew it well. It's in her blood.

Rick and Morgan have called down the moon.

All around her, the cyne is silent and waiting, Daryl a warm looming presence on her right and Glenn his own kind of solidity on her left. Rick has fixed Morgan in his gaze, his eyes narrowed and unwavering, and yet again it's no real surprise to her when they all start to change.

It's fast. Businesslike. She never would have believed that there could be different moods to how one could do that, from the heady sensuality Daryl uses with her to the utilitarian speed of this. In a few seconds, she's surrounded by huge furry bodies - and she gives them only a cursory glance. It's mostly unremarkable now.

Except there's Daryl so close beside her, and her own flame leaps between her thighs, bleeding heat into the rest of her. She's not going to leap on him right here in front of everyone, but part of her wants to, and she darts her eyes to the side and to the thicker fur at his groin, wondering - with a flutter of a decidedly inappropriate giggle in her chest - whether he'll be feeling enough of the same urge that he'll have difficulty concealing it.

She can feel it in him, flaring with her - deep instinctive need in perfect sync with her own, the thought of him flipping her onto her hands and knees and ripping her jeans down and _slamming_ into her. But so far so good.

And she manages to not giggle.

Rick growls low in his throat, something she interprets as a call to order, and instantly Morgan raises his head. In fierd - like the rest of them - there are through-lines to his human form: slender and powerful, corded muscle wound under his thick black fur, his eyes dark and glittering and keen. Plain brown leather cuffs encircle his wrists. His ears are pricked, and he picks up his staff and lays it across his lap. As seems to happen with their other weapons, it's altered its size to fit him, and she isn't convinced it's her imagination when she catches a faint glow at both ends.

"Hlystan altawe," he says. " _Listen well._

" _Not all of what I have to tell you is something I'm sure of. There's a great deal I still don't know. But for years now I've been walking the world, and I've seen enough to be sure of the biggest parts. No one becomes an Ancra without more knowledge than any sane one of us would ever want. Here is what I've gathered, as completely as I can tell it. When I'm finished…_ "

His lips pull back from his muzzle in a thin smile, revealing the many gleaming points of his teeth. " _When I'm finished, we can decide just how fucked we are_."

* * *

It begins with the Tower. _Do ye ken_ the Dark Tower, as they say in Mid-World? And before you ask, I never made it that far. Never tried. I've been plenty stupid plenty of times, but so far I haven't been _that_ bad. Still alive, aren't I?

The Dark Tower, Anwaldtur, Tor a Eallweald, whatever you want to call it - it's not falling yet. But it's close. Something is breaking away the beams that hold it up. I don't know exactly what, but I do know who's directing it. We've all heard the stories about the _Readfah Bregu?_ The Red King? Like most stories, they were never just stories. And he's worse than we ever knew. He's not worse than the Cweal, but as far as I could ever learn, he's _of_ it, though I don't completely understand that part either. _Why_ he wants to bring the whole thing down is another mystery. All I know is that he does. And the way things are going, he just might do it.

How to stop him? Again: I don't know. But there are those out there - out beyond the borders of our world - who are trying. I've only heard tales, but I believe them. He's powerful, this Crimson King, but he's not unopposed.

What does that have to do with us? The Tower has to do with everything. But everything around the Tower is breaking as well. The ties that bind reality together are thinning. Laws aren't reliable, and none of this is just _happening_. It's _being done_. Evil has a long reach, and we've always been fighting chaos, but the chaos we fight has a new backer. The King hasn't made a target of our world, not yet. His concerns are the Tower and the Beams. But he's dispatched servants to the worlds he hasn't turned his eye toward, and he hasn't neglected us.

We know the Ytend have been getting stronger and their numbers have been growing. We haven't been able to figure out why, where they're all coming from. Turns out they're not coming from _here_. It's those thin places, where the borders between us and worlds beyond are weakening and fading. Those places the Ytend like to make their dens aren't just their dens. They're the doorways where they come _through_. And someone is _sending_ them.

I believe - I'm pretty sure - that whoever or whatever is doing that also sent the people who came after Lori and Carl and Judith. That wasn't the first time, either. These pieces of filth have been hunting us for a long time, and they've gotten good at it. I don't know how many they've killed, but it seems like this is almost always how they do it - they attack the children and the mates first, especially the Eal's if they have any, weaken the cyne's resolve, let it start to tear itself apart from within, and then they come in and finish the job. It's far easier for them than it once would have been. The cyne are usually small now, and we're scattered and stretched thin. Cut off from each other.

Yes, I'll get to that.

They're only one threat of many we face these days, but they're among the worst I've found or heard of, and now they're after you. A clock has begun ticking and you're all on borrowed time. You're officially at war. You come together and find your strength, fight back hard, or you're already dead.

The good news - and I know it's barely good at all - is that they failed their first offense. Or I guess it's more accurate to say they weren't entirely successful. They got Rick's daughter, and that's a blow it's going to be hard to recover from, but they barely scratched Carl, and at least for the moment, Lori is alive too. Rick tells me you killed one and wounded their leader. If your time is borrowed, that got you a little more of it. But don't count on it being much.

So why haven't you been able to find any of the other cyne? Why haven't you been able to find anyone else at all? Thing is, they're out there, same as you. It took a lot of time and a hell of a lot of work I would rather I didn't have to do, but I did find some. The cyne in Raleigh is alive, though they're down to four. Richmond is gone, and so is Columbus, but Boston and Detroit are hanging on with six each. DC, Baltimore, and Philadelphia are kicking, and they've all got at least seven. I went from coast to coast, and LA and Seattle are all dead, but San Francisco has nine. I heard Portland was surviving, but I couldn't find anyone. Doesn't mean they weren't there. Denver, too - eight. The New York cyne is doing the best of any I contacted, though Chicago is close - New York has twelve, Chicago has ten. Both of them have an eafora, though only one. It's still better than nothing at all.

There are also some rumors floating around about some of them going to ground - mostly out in Wyoming and Montana and the Dakotas. Big empty places where you could disappear if you wanted to. But I have no idea if that's true.

As far as the rest of the world goes? I don't know. I just don't know. It's not that I didn't look. I think we have to act as if they're gone, because they might as well be.

Why you haven't been able to contact them - it's the Veil. I know, it sounds crazy. But that's the closest I ever came to an answer. I said before how nothing is working the way it should, and that includes this. Someone - probably the same someone who's doing everything else - is distorting it, manipulating it, using it to hide us from each other. Letters get lost. Calls don't go through. Emails bounce. Facebook, Twitter, anything else like that - they're _there,_ but it's like you're blocked. You're blocked from everything. You could be standing right next to one of them and you might not know it, not because you couldn't _see_ them but because neither of you would have any idea what the other one _was_.

I got through… Like I said. A lot of time, a lot of seriously unpleasant work. Right now it doesn't matter how I did it. What matters is that I did. And we're cut off, we're _dying_ off, but we're not alone. We're not the last ones.

Eostre hasn't abandoned us. In her way, she's fighting just like we are. And she's up against more than we know.

Where we go from here is more than I can tell you. What I've learned… It's a start. The truth doesn't only make us free. It makes us stronger. It gives us a place to stand. And before this is over, for life or for death, believe me: We will all have to stand.

 _Nu min sothgiedd sy asodon, fyrdgesteallan. Now, comrades, my tale is told._

* * *

The silence stretches out, thicker and lying more heavily every second rather than thinning. Above the circle, the sphere of fire is considerably dimmer than it was, its rotation even slower. Beth looks up, rubs at her eyes; it feels almost as if she's coming out of a dream, Morgan's rough, quiet voice lulling her into itself. She shoots Daryl a glance; he's sitting with his big head tipped down, his eyes half closed but shining out from beneath his lids. Moving without thinking, she lays a hand over the silky fur at the top of his thigh, and on his knees his claws twitch.

Not a dream. A trance. To some degree, they've all been in one, receiving what Morgan has to tell them. Now Morgan has bowed his head and shut his eyes fully, as silent as if he never spoke at all.

Then Rick stirs and lets out another one of those soft growls, and everyone else stirs as well.

Beth expects Rick to pick up the line of conversation, but instead it's Shane, tight. Strained.

" _So we fight. Now. How do we do that?_ "

" _We find them_." Michonne. At some point she removed her sword from her back and laid it across her knees like Morgan's staff, and now she curls her clawed fingers more firmly around it, as if she's itching to use it. " _We do like we did before. But smarter. We draw them out on our terms. We take them down_."

Glenn frowns, leaning forward. " _How do we find them? They'll have vanished by now. They have to know we'll be looking_."

" _You got a Spyre, little man,_ " Daryl murmurs, and a couple of months ago Beth would have sincerely doubted that she would be able to detect the faintest of smiles on a wolf's face, but she can. " _You forget? You got a tracker._ "

It hits her then, what this means, what they have to do, and her gut wrenches in on itself. She hates it. She absolutely fucking hates it. She hated it before and she hates it even more now, despite the fact that the place will very likely be deserted - but she understands: they don't have a choice anymore.

Not that they ever did. Even if it was one of the worst mistakes any of them ever made.

"You have to go back to where they were," she says quietly. "That building, the one where Daryl and me found 'em. Their _den_. You have to start there and pick up the trail."

Shane huffs a terse breath, shakes his head. " _No. No, that's too fucking small. What about this_ Crimson King? _Why don't we go to the source? Find this prick and stop him?_ "

" _Because I don't think that's given to us to do,_ " Morgan says, not looking up, and Beth remembers Pythia standing before Rick, small woman who nevertheless seemed to tower over them all, and what she said.

 _In your world it's not for her. It's not for you either, Rick. Or your cyne._

 _What's left of it._

Shane rumbles an angry growl. " _Fuck that. It's given to us to protect this whole damn world, isn't it? So why wouldn't this be involved?_ "

" _The Tower is all worlds, not one. The task is monumental. We might be able to leave this world and seek the Tower, yes. But we would be_ leaving this world. _Sacrificing it to what's destroying it_ right now _for the sake of saving as many others as possible. That's not what Eostre charged us to do, the second the first Hathsta rose from her hands. This world is under our protection. No other._ "

Shane is opening his mouth to keep arguing, but Morgan pushes on over him. " _Anyway, as I said, I heard of others taking it on. Those who are closer to it, who know more. I know it's hard to believe, and it might not be true, but out in the farthest reaches, I heard stories of Gunslingers walking the worlds_."

Silence crashes down again, stunned. Beth is nonplussed, looking around at them - and then it slams into her, vivid as a suddenly remembered dream: darkness and weary terror and the painful brilliance of muzzle flashes, eyeless horrors falling to her bullets, the awful-wonderful weight of the gun in her hand. She can feel Daryl's worried attention, his immediate knowledge that something is wrong, but it also means nothing to her. The memory - or whatever it is - is everything.

 _I kill with my heart._

Not in this world. But there are others.

" _Not possible,_ " Carol breathes. " _It's not. We heard they all fell._ "

Morgan shrugs. " _Maybe we heard wrong._ "

" _Doesn't matter._ " Rick, pushing up into a crouch, his claws tapping the concrete and his teeth bared as if in a wince. He sounds pained. He sounds as if every movement and every word is nearly more than he can bear. " _Yes, we'll fight. We'll kill them all. But not now_."

He stands and turns toward the door, his massive shoulders slumped, and as one the cyne lets out a sigh. Even Beth, her heart withering beneath her breastbone. Like her body already knows what he's going to say.

" _I have to burn my daughter._ "


	58. this is a gift, it comes with a price

**Chapter 58: this is a gift, it comes with a price**

Beth doesn't follow them outside.

It's not a decision she considers and arrives at; she merely senses that she should hang back, stay behind, let them follow Rick out to the cars and go over whatever they need to go over as a cyne. And she doesn't _want_ to be with them, she realizes as she nods to Daryl to indicate that he should go along for the time being. She feels like she's had no time to herself in days. She _hasn't_ had any time to herself in days; even her showers haven't been solo. Not that she's complaining about that, but even so.

She stands alone in the huge room and tilts her head back, staring up at the ceiling she can't quite see, listening to the soft rustle of pigeons nesting in the cracks of those shadows. Pigeons - or she guesses that's what they are. She can hear wings, little cooing noises.

Yet the floor is entirely free of droppings.

Maybe they aren't pigeons after all.

Very distantly, she hears the receding hum of cars departing, and a few seconds later Daryl steps back through the pitch-dark doorway, emerging as if through the surface of slick tar. He's walking on all fours, something she's gathered he does out of habit when he's especially tired, and even though it's not even late afternoon, it makes sense that he would be. She watches him approach, unmoving, as that weariness sweeps over and through her like a wave, and when he reaches her and crouches in front of her, she circles her arms around his neck and leans against him. Even crouching, his head is practically level with hers, and she doesn't need to bend.

He lifts a paw and curls it around her lower back, the heel of his palm and the tips of his fingers nearly framing the sides of her waist. As always with him, she feels so small, small and strong, protected but not weak. And she _can_ be weak with him, when she needs to be.

"Magden," he murmurs, and is silent again.

 _Magden_. She muses on that for a moment or two. _Girl._ He's also called her _lufiend, afena, agendfra_ \- _sweetheart, mate,_ and _mistress_ \- but even if those fit, especially the last two, _girl_ somehow fits the best of all.

So she might as well tell him. She has no idea yet whether thoughts that concrete and complex transfer across whatever connection they now share, but she _does_ know that it still matters a great deal when things are spoken aloud. "I like when you call me that." She combs her hands through the fur at the sides of his head, just at the corners of his jaw, leans back to meet his eyes and smiles faintly. "You should keep doin' it."

" _I will._ " He flicks his tongue against her right wrist - avoiding the leather and silver on her left. It's interesting, she thinks, that she hasn't felt the urge to stop wearing something that can technically hurt him. And he hasn't given her any indication that he wants her to.

But while it would be so good to get lost in this and allow herself to forget everything else for a few hours - perhaps even until tomorrow - she's perfectly aware that she can't. Her smile vanishes and she bites at her lip. "What's gonna happen? With… With Judith?"

 _I have to burn my daughter._

Daryl closes his eyes and lowers his head, and when her stomach twists sharply she knows it's his pain joining hers, and she sighs.

" _Has to get her from the morgue,_ " he says softly. " _And get ready for the funeral. It has to happen as soon as it can._ "

Of course it does. But the way he's talking, the urgency isn't like it would be for another family. She studies him. "How come?"

" _We don't embalm our dead. We sit a vigil for a night, and then we burn them._ " Simple, unvarnished. And somehow, instinctively, she both knows and understands.

It's horrible. But she gets it.

"What about family?"

" _He doesn't have any others. Just us. Same with her._ " For the briefest of moments his lips pull back from his teeth in a grimace, and he butts the top of her shoulder with his brow. He's fighting tears. " _Lori. She'll miss it. They can't get her there, she can't get out of the hospital. That should never happen. That should never fucking_ happen."

A flash of intuition, clearer than most of what she's felt before. To this point, it's been almost entirely emotion, powerful but nebulous, like dense clouds of feeling. Now what comes to her is an image and a fact, a memory but also she's _there_ : the fire, an _immense_ fire, an entire house engulfed in flame. Boards crashing inward in explosions of sparks. Gasps and screams. Gaping faces of a crowd gathered. And a little boy standing there, watching it burn with no discernible expression.

His mother died. But that's not all that happened to her.

"You never got to give her a funeral," she whispers, and he hisses a breath and stiffens. "Did you? She was already burned. There was nothing left."

There's no hesitation. He nods, wordless. She shouldn't go on, part of her wants to stop because it feels like she's hitting him with every word - but that's not true. It hurts him, yes. But she _should_ go on. This is her husband. This is her mate. She has to know him, and he has to know that she knows.

"He didn't let you do _anythin'_ for her."

" _He lost his fucking mind._ " Daryl releases a shuddering breath, and another as she strokes his fur. " _She left him. Or that's how he saw it. And I… I don't know that he was wrong._ "

She leans in, presses her forehead against his. "She didn't wanna leave you."

" _How the fuck do you know that?_ " Hard, abruptly angry, but none of the anger directed at her. There's no fire behind it. It's all sad bewilderment, bitter on her tongue.

She has no good answer to that. Nothing besides the truth. "I just know." The good in him, the sweetness and the loyalty and the desperate, despairing need to be more than he believes he is… It had to come from somewhere. The love he's capable of, fiercer and deeper than she ever would have dared to think anyone could ever feel for her. "She would've wanted to save you. You _and_ your brother. But she wouldn't have known how. It must've torn her apart inside." She lifts her head, presses her lips to his silky brow. "She shouldn't have left you. But it wasn't your fault. You hear me? It wasn't because of anythin' you did. _It wasn't your fault._ "

He releases a broken whimper, and that's when she realizes that she's crying, and she doesn't know when she started. But when she speaks next, it's as if she's letting go of a breath she's been holding for more than a year. Because that's exactly what she's doing. Finally.

"Just like it wasn't mine."

 _There you go, Bethy_. Her father, quiet behind her. She can sense that he's not alone. They're all there, standing close to her, and she feels their love just as strong as she feels Daryl's. And she doesn't think it's all in her head. _You get it now._

They stay there for what feels like a long, long time. Then, responding to a request she didn't have to voice, he lifts her into his arms, straightens, carries her up the stairs to his den.

* * *

It's no mystery to her, why she wants it so suddenly and so bad. It's not even sudden; she's wanted it since she woke up, wants it all the time now. Maybe it'll throttle back eventually and maybe it won't, but for now she's aching as he slips off his belt and his knife, as he crouches back down in the center of the floor and stares at her with smoldering eyes, as she begins to undress. She's frantic for him, her pussy throbbing and flaring every time the pressure of the crotch of her jeans increases, but she's going slowly, shrugging her coat off, tugging her shirt over her head and letting it fall. Afternoon sun is pouring through the window, casting everything in gold, setting the ends of his fur on dark fire.

She's so _warm,_ moaning as she thumbs her jeans down her legs and her thighs squeeze together. She's warm and he's hard, his cock rising from the thick nest of his fur, the head shining as precome gathers there. Like always, almost as wet as she is, when she slides her hand between her legs and touches the drenched cotton of her panties.

Absurdly, she wants to laugh. She's going through underwear a lot faster because of him.

She cups herself. Presses. Lets her head fall back as another moan rises from her throat, a moan he echoes in a low growl. She's rubbing her clit through the fabric, circling, and walking toward him, and though she might expect him to be watching her touching herself, his eyes are locked on hers as he reaches down and takes himself in his clawed hand, his teeth gleaming pale in the sunlight.

Precome drips down his shaft and the backs of his knuckles, and her mouth waters, and that's when she knows what she wants to do with him.

She's managing to disengage her fingers from her cunt, reaching back and unhooking her bra, as she stops in front of him. He strokes himself and the pleasure is enough to roll her eyes back and set her lids fluttering, but she shakes her head and he freezes, gazing at her, clearly beseeching.

For what, she's certain he doesn't know. Except for her to reveal what she needs from him.

She smiles lazily as she lifts her hands and cups her tits, ghosts her fingertips across her nipples and coaxes them erect and tight, little sparks rippling through the branches of her nerves. Losing herself - she can now. Just for now. There's nothing else for her to do, nowhere else for her to be, and also she's _meant_ to be doing this, compelled by a need as deep as any she's ever felt.

"Sit back," she murmurs, and he practically scrambles to obey her, rocking back onto his ass with his black-brown plume of a tail curled beside him, braced on his paws, his lupine hind legs spread and his cock jutting up and glistening and ready for her.

She steps between his thighs and sinks to her knees, curls her hands around his base, and as he twitches and whimpers, she bends and licks long and unhurried up the underside of his shaft.

It comes to her that she hasn't done this - not like _this_ \- since the beach, and it comes rushing back to her with the taste of him: darker and saltier, and something else she can't articulate even to herself. Like his scent on her blanket that first night. Leather, smoke, blood… And wolf. Lapping it up now, humming and shivering with the hot sweetness pulsing from him into her and once more squeezing her legs into a steady rhythm, barely feeling the twinges in her knees. He whines in that rhythm as she swirls her tongue over skin as silky in its way as his fur, toys one-handed with his balls, licks up to the head and tries - unsuccessfully - to keep up with the precome flowing heavy from his slit. Smooth and bittersweet in her mouth, her throat, running down her chin. She glances up and he's watching her, panting, tongue lolling between his teeth, and it's like lightning all along her spine and into the core of her pussy.

She pushes up a little further and doesn't break with his gaze as she opens her mouth as wide as she can, so wide her jaw hurts, and stretches her lips around him.

It's not quite wide enough. She can't quite make it. Someone else might be able to - but it could never matter to him. His head sags between his shoulders and he keens, edging close to a howl, his hips quivering with what she can tell is the urge to buck into her mouth, try to push his way in regardless. More precome wells and she swallows, swirling her tongue again, flicking at his slit - encouraging. Gliding her slick lips over him, nuzzling at him, licking, doing everything she can if she can't actually suck him. And the noises that bleed out of him are utterly helpless, pleading for her to keep going, it's so good, it's so fucking _good, oh magden, girl, oh my god, please please, oh fuck please. Besece. Agendfra. Besorg magden. Afon hit fa mec._

 _Take it from me._

The words are what earns it for him. She didn't even know she was waiting for them, doesn't think for the present about what they mean. They enter her and she sends him unspoken permission, licking him faster and rougher and dragging him to the edge, and he chokes back a roar and wrenches and spills over her face and her hands, gushes into her mouth, spatters her upper thighs and her tits. There's so _much_ of it, and she already knew that, but it feels like forever ago, and it nearly takes her by surprise. Instinctively she swallows and jerks him through it, rapid movements but slowing as the last of it drains out of him and the tension leaves him, and he slumps back on trembling arms, groaning her name.

She doesn't climb up him, doesn't want to _cuddle._ Doesn't want him to help her take her turn. She rolls back with her own legs spread, scoops up his come with her fingers and yanks the crotch of her panties aside, rubbing it against her already-slippery pussy. She's wild, nothing but that bestial instinct, plunging her fingers into herself and pushing his come inside her, collecting more, circling her swollen clit and crying out as her orgasm slams into her. And she doesn't stop, _can't_ stop; she goes back for _more,_ fucking herself in furious pumps of her hand, coming over and _over,_ pouring slick against her hand and falling back to writhe on the floor like a seizure with her cries trapped behind her clenched teeth.

She needs him in her. She _needs it._ It's silly romance novel bullshit to think of it as _his seed_ , but she is. No regrets, doing him like this. But she needs his come, inside her, _now._

Until she's exhausted and limp and dazed. Staring up at the sunlit ceiling, breath heaving in her lungs, her sticky fingers loosely curled at her sides. Half formed thoughts are careening through her mind. What this is. What she's doing. How good it is.

How absolutely fucking terrifying.

It takes her a couple of minutes to realize that he's bending over her and, in what's become a ritual for him, licking her clean.

Sanctified.

* * *

 _"The vigil will be tonight,_ " he says softly, later, pulling her tighter into his arms. It's not only his voice that's soft; it's all of him, enveloping her and enclosing her, making a shield of itself. She presses her ear to his chest and does what she loves to do - listens to his thunderous heart, allows the rhythm to lull her.

Even though she hears him, and she can't stop hearing.

She blinks up into one of the finals shafts of evening sun, the world all dancing golden dust motes. "Do we have to be there?"

" _No. It'll just be him._ " He pauses, and it's a dense pause, difficult to take a breath inside it. " _We'll do it tomorrow at dawn._ "

"Where?"

The answer is precisely what she expected. " _Here._ _In Eostre's circle._ " He exhales, strokes a claw down her back, and she shivers and tucks her head more firmly beneath his jaw. " _Dawn is her time._ "

"What happens to her? To Judith?" The question comes all at once and demands to be asked; it occurs to her that she knows almost nothing about this, about what they believe when it comes to the souls of the dead. Because the Hathsta _do_ believe in souls. She knows that without having to confirm. When two lovers mate, souls are united.

She has to believe that part, too. She's felt it. She feels it now.

" _Eostre takes care of her,_ " he whispers. She senses that he can't manage anything above that. " _There's a forest. A feast that never ends. She'll be happy there._ "

She nods. "You see all the people you love there? In the end?"

" _If they've kept their honor. Repented for the things they did wrong._ "

Familiar. Everyone has a story like this, in one way or another. Good rewarded, evil punished, and all in a better world than this one. Not so long ago she would have scoffed at the idea, but not anymore. She hopes it's true. She hopes very much.

Even if she can't quite believe that far.

She's quiet for a long time, nestled against him. The blanket is lying low over her hips, but though the sun is almost down and a chill must be setting in outside, she's not cold. He's wrapped her up in his warmth, in his softness, and beneath the grief seeping back into her, she's full of a bizarre species of happiness.

 _Full._ That's it. That's the feeling. She's full. Like she'll never be empty again.

But there's still so much to be afraid of.

"That's where you go," she says at last. "The forest. The feast. What about us? What about… What about your mates?"

" _Magden._ "

Scarcely more than a breath. Ragged at the edges, as if once more he's fighting back tears - and when she strokes up through his fur, she feels the wet at the corner of his eye. _Don't put me off,_ she thinks. Sends. _Don't try to change the subject. Answer me._

But she already knows he will.

 _"Magden,_ " he repeats, and his heart beats faster. Harder. She settles her hand over the beat as though she can protect it, keep it beating through sheer force of will.

As though that might be possible.

" _No matter what happens… I'll see you again._ "


	59. PSA

**An announcement:** As of now, I won't be updating Howl on this site any longer. I'm really sorry to those of you who have been following it here, but for a variety of reasons - much of it having to do with the anti-fandom history of this site and much of it having to do with the simple fact of how unpleasant/clunky/needlessly restrictive I find it to use - I just frankly don't want to deal with it anymore.

This means I won't be posting here anymore at all. The fics I've posted so far will stay up, but there won't be anything new from me.

I _am_ still updating Howl regularly over at Archive of Our Own (and in fact I'm up to chapter 64 over there), along with a bunch of other things. The vast majority of my stuff has always been there; what I post to this site has only ever been a tiny percentage of my TWD output anyway.

So I hope I'll be seeing you there. Thanks so much for being a reader. I appreciate you endlessly. ❤️


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